Stack 

Annex 

JC 

585 

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ROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM 


.  If. 


</ • 


SKETCHES 


Progress  of  freedom 


FREDERICK    MAY    HOLLAND 


.  .  . AUTHOR    OF  ... 


Ciberty  in  the  nineteenth  Century; 


BOSTON    INVESTIGATOR    CO. 
1900. 


STACK 
ANNEX 

Ot, 


SKETCHES    OF    THE    PROGRESS 
OF    FREEDOM. 


A  great  step  in  the  progress  of  freedom  was  taken 
during  the  fifteenth  century,  in  consequence  of  a  sudden 
and  rapid  growth  of  interest  in  classic  literature.  A 
region  of  thought,  wholly  outside  of  Christian  influence, 
and  illuminated  by  authors  whose  originality  had  not 
yet  been  equalled  and  whose  love  of  liberty  can  never 
be  surpassed,  was  thrown  open  to  men  and  women  who 
had  hitherto  read  scarcely  any  books  not  written  in 
support  of  popes  and  kings. 

Study  of  the  Latin  classics  had  been  much  encouraged 
during  the  latter  half  of  the  fourteenth  century  by 
Petrarch  and  Boccaccio.  Italy  soon  abounded  in  schol- 
ars who  were  busy  in  expounding  and  translating  the 
ancient  masterpieces.  Many  books  by  Cicero,  Tacitus, 
Lucretius  and  other  great  thinkers,  were  unearthed  in 
monastic  libraries,  where  the  amount  of  ancient  litera- 
ture which  was  preserved  was  small  in  proportion  to 
what  had  perished  needlessly,  or  been  wantonly  de- 
stroyed. Little  was  known  about  Greek  in  western 
Europe  except  by  isolated  students  like  Heloise  and 
Bacon  before  the  closing  years  of  the  fourteenth  cent- 
ury, when  the  language  of  Plato  and  Aristotle  was 
taught  in  Florence.  Many  manuscripts  of  the  great 


2  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

philosophers  and  dramatists,  as  well  as  of  Plutarch, 
Lucian,  Thucydides,  and  other  authors  whose  tone  of 
thought  was  more  advanced  than  that  of  any  mediaeval 
writer,  were  brought  back  from  Greece  early  in  the 
fifteenth  century;  and  the  capture  of  Constantinople  by 
the  Moslems  obliged  many  learned  Greeks  to  flee  to 
Italy,  where  they  were  cordially  welcomed  by  the 
princes  as  well  as  by  the  popes. 

-  This  literary  movement  owed  much  to  the  establish- 
ment during  the  fourteenth  century  of  nine  universities 
south,  and  as  many  north,  of  the  Alps,  besides*  four 
colleges  in  Oxford  and  five  in  Cambridge,  institutions 
originally  intended  to  promote  scholasticism,  but  des- 
tined ere  long  to  become  centres  of  the  new  culture. 
The  latter  influence  was  still  stronger  in  the  twenty 
universities  ^hich  were  founded  during  the  fifteenth 
century,  in  company  with  three  of  the  Oxford  and  seven 
of  the  Cambridge  colleges. 

The  tendency  of  loving  learning  for  its  own  sake  was 
soon  apparent.  The  University  of  Paris  took  the  lead 
in  calling  on  kings  and  nations  to  end  the  contest  be- 
tween rival  popes,  and  reform  other  ecclesiastical 
abuses.  Professors  sat  beside  bishops  and  princes  in 
the  Council  of  Constance,  which  deposed  three  pontiffs 
and  restored  unity,  though  not  purity,  to  the  Cburch. 
The  next  council,  that  at  Basel,  recognized  the  right  of 
heretics  in  arms  to  obtain  peace,  by  insisliag  on  tol- 
eration. 

Among  the  mistakes  at  Constance  was  that  of  burn- 
ing a  follower  of  Wy cliff e  from  Bohemia  named  Huss 
for  refusing  to  recant  opinions,  some  of  which  he  had 
never  held,  while  others  were  taken  from  Scripture. 
He  had  come  to  Constance  under  a  safe-conduct;  but 


PROGRESS   OF  FREEDOM.  3 

the  highest  authority  in  the  Church  decided  that  here- 
tics had  no  right  to  be  treated  honestly.  He  was  allowed 
a  month  to  deliberate,  before  he  went  bravely  to  the 
flames.  He  was  no  rationalist;  but  his  paper  mitre, 
painted  with  figures  of  devils,  was  the  cap  of  liberty. 
Soon  after  the  execution  a  proclamation  was  posted  up 
in  Constance,  saying,  "The  Holy  Ghost  to  the  Fathers 
in  council,  greeting!  Do  your  work  as  best  you  can. 
I  have  business  elsewhere." 

It  had  been  already  discovered  in  Bohemia  that  the 
Bible  gives  all  Christians  a  right  to  the  communion 
cup,  and  a  convenient  emblem  was  thus  ready  for  the 
banners  of  the  insurgent  Hussites.  Their  leader,  Zizka, 
was  the  first  general  to  use  gunpowder  with  much  ef- 
fect; and  decisive  victories  were  gained,  in  1420,  over 
vastly  superior  forces  by  the  aid  of  his  invention  of 
movable  forts,  made  by  chaining  together  wagons  fitted 
with  very  high  sides  and  filled  with  musketeers.  The 
emperor  brought  a  horde  of  nearly  a  hundred  thousand 
crusaders  into  Bohemia  that  summer,  but  even  the  Eed 
Cross  Knights  were  driven  back  by  the  heretics'  can- 
non. Zizka  had  already  founded  the  city  of  Tabor  for 
his  adherents,  who  held  public  worship  in  their  own 
language,  suffered  women  to  preach,  called  each  other 
brother  and  sister,  and  formed  a  pure  democracy  in 
which  everybody  was  taught  to  read  and  write.  The 
more  aristocratic  of  the  Hussites  were  called  Calixtines, 
because  they  would  have  been  satisfied  with  permission 
to  use  the  cup.  The  bloody  battles  between  Calixtines 
and  Taborites  did  not  prevent  co-operation  against  in- 
vaders; four  successive  armies  of  crusaders  were  found 
too  cowardly  to  meet  the  Hussites,  and  the  latter  came 
to  an  agreement  among  themselves,  which  enabled 


them  to  overrun  Austria,  Bavaria  and  Saxony.  A  new 
council,  which  was  vainly  attempting  to  make  the  papacy 
a  constitutional  monarchy  and  otherwise  reform  the 
Church,  invited  the  Hussite  leaders  te  Basel,  where  they 
were  allowed  to  hold  public  worship  in  German  and 
argue  openly  for  freedom  in  the  pulpit.  The  council 
finally  promised  that  the  communion  cup  might  be  used 
by  all  Christians  in  Bohemia  and  Moravia;  and  the 
right  was  retained  for  nearly  two  hundred  years.  In 
that  blood-stained  chalice  lay  precious  seeds.  Progress 
was  suspended  by  a  new  war,  levied  by  the  Calixtine 
nobles  against  the  Taborites.  The  fierce  sect  was  de- 
stroyed, except  the  remnant  whose  descendants  are 
meek  Moravians;  but  it  was  not  until  after  the  middle 
of  the  century  that  Tabor  ceased  to  be  what  one  of  the 
popes  indignantly  called  "a  place  where  every  man  may 
believe  what  he  likes." 

Christian  women  had  been  slaves  to  the  Church  and 
ciphers  in  the  State,  but  they  were  now  greatly  encour- 
aged to  think  and  act  for  themselves  by  the  example  of 
an  illiterate  young  peasant,  who  was  no  heretic,  though 
she  fell  a  victim  to  pious  fraud.  The  claim  of  Joan  of 
Arc,  that  she  was  sent  by  virgin-martyrs  and  warrior- 
angels  to  drive  the  English  out  of  France,  was  so  well 
supported  by  the  enthusiasm  of  the  troops,  and  by  her 
own  courage  and  military  skill,  that  she  won  some  brill- 
iant victories.  She  had  not  done  all  she  promised  when 
she  was  taken  prisoner  and  brought  to  trial  for  having 
given  too  much  reverence  to  what  she  called  her  voices, 
and  violated  the  text  in  Deuteronomy  (xx.  5),  which 
calls  the  wearing  of  male  attire  by  a  woman  an  abomi- 
nation unto  God.  Her  conduct  in  both  respects  had 
been  fully  sanctioned  by  an  archbishop,  and  her  appeal 


PROGRESS   OF  FREEDOM.  5 

to  the  pope  ought  to  have  saved  her  life,  though  the 
friendlesa  girl,  not  yet  twenty,  suffering  from  illness, 
loaded  with  chains,  and  in  constant  danger  of  death  and 
dishonor,  dared  to  say  to  the  bishop  and  abbots  who 
threatened  to  doom  her  to  the  flames:  "Take  heed  not 
to  judge  badly,  for  the  Lord  would  punish  you." 
"Nothing  in  the  world  can  make  me  say  that  I  did  not 
do  those  deeds  in  obedience  to  God."  "What  he  bids 
me,  I  will  not  fail  to  do."  Instruments  of  torture  were 
brought  before  her,  but  she  showed  no  fear,  and  they 
were  decided  to  be  useless.  She  was  told  that  if  she 
submitted  she  would  be  set  free,  but  otherwise  she  must 
be  burned. 

It  was  not  until  she  was  about  to  be  led  to  the  stake 
that  she  said,  "I  will  give  up  my  visions,  and  dress  as 
other  women  do."  The  illiterate  girl  was  tricked  into 
making  her  mark  under  what  was  supposed  by  her  to 
be  only  a  brief  pledge  to  this  effect,  but  waa  really  a 
long  indictment,  charging  her  with  the  worst  crimes. 
She  was  then  told  that  she  was  to  be  imprisoned  for 
life  on  bread  and  water.  She  asked  that  she  might  be 
confined  in  a  nunnery;  but  she  was  sent  back  among 
soldiers  who  had  already  made  her  fear  the  worst  of 
wrongs.  The  woman's  dress  was  taken  away  while  she 
slept,  and  she  asked  in  vain  for  other  garments  than 
the  male  attire,  which  had  been  placed  beside  her  bed, 
and  which  seemed  necessary  to  protect  her  against  vio- 
lence. Noon  came  before  she  put  it  on;  but  this  was 
pronounced  a  capital  crime.  She  told  her  judges  that 
she  would  dress  as  other  women  did  if  she  could  be 
imprisoned  with  them.  She  was  questioned  again 
about  her  voices,  and  replied  that  in  disowning  them 
she  had  damned  her  soul  to  save  her  life.  "The  truth 


6  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

is,  God  did  send  me.  I  had  rather  do  penance  once  for 
all  and  die  than  stay  in  prison.  I  will  give  up  about 
the  dress,  but  I  can  do  nothing  more.  Bishop,  I  die 
through  you;  I  appeal  from  you  to  God."  She  had  the 
cross  held  up  before  her  eyes  as  she  perished  in  the 
flames,  and  she  kept  her  faith  in  her  voices  firm  unto 
the  last. 

Joan  of  Arc  did  not  know  how  soon  the  power  of 
putting  people  to  death  for  opinions  would  be  taken 
away  by  a  new  invention  which  would  enable  the  many 
to  discover  what  was  plain  already  to  a  favored  few, 
namely,  that  knowledge  is  better  than  faith.  Printing 
with  wooden  blocks  had  been  done  at  Haarlem  before 
her  execution.  Metal  types  seem  to  have  been  used 
there  in  1445;  and  Gutenberg  was  at  work  in  Mainz  in 
1454.  In  twenty  years  after  that  time,  types  were 
coming  into  general  use.  Five  thousand  works,  in- 
cluding those  of  Lucian  and  Lucretius,  were  published 
in  Italy  before  the  end  of  the  century,  and  more  than 
half  of  them  at  Tenice.  There  was  no  such  activity 
in  any  one  place  north  of  the  Alps, but  the  total  amount 
was  equally  great;  and  a  dozen  editions  of  the  Bible  in 
the  peoples'  own  language  were  among  the  productions 
of  the  presses  in  fifty  German  cities. 

Italian  printers  were  soon  busy  publishing  recent 
books,  like  Petrarch's  lyrics,  Ariosto's  "Orlando  Furi- 
oso,"  burlesques  of  chivalry  by  Pulci,  Berui  and  Boi- 
ardo,  comedies  by  Ariosto  and  Machiavelli^and  licen- 
tious tales  by  Boccaccio,  and  other  novelists  who  fur- 
nished precious  ore  to  Shakespeare.  Thus  appeared, 
about  the  year  1500,  the  first  great  modern  literature, 
free  from  mediaeval  superstition,  asceticism  or  intoler- 
ance, entirely  devoted  to  the  interests  of  the  day,  and 


PROGRESS   OF  FREEDOM.  7 

so  independent  of  clerical  authority  as  to  take  little 
notice  of  monks  or  priests,  except  as  peculiarly  good 
subjects  for  ridicule.  The  very  fact  that  Boccaccio, 
Pulci,  Anosto,  and  their  literary  contemporaries  were 
not  trying  to  convert  but  to  amuse  their  readers  made 
them  all  the  more  mighty  in  substituting  secular  for 
orthodox  views. 

This  great  change  was  promoted  by  no  one  more  suc- 
cessfully than  by  one  of  the  most  zealous  Catholics  of 
the  age,  Columbus.  The  influence  of  his  achievement 
was  all  the  greater  because  Portuguese  navigators  had 
already  begun  to  open  what  proved  to  be  a  better  route 
than  his  own  to  the  goal  he  sought.  Vasco  da  Gama 
actually  reached  India  before  the  end  of  the  century 
by  sailing  around  Africa.  The  first  step  toward  estab- 
lishing the  dominion  of  the  English  race  in  !N"orth 
America  was  taken  in  1497,  when  that  continent  was 
discovered  by  the  Cabots.  The  circumnavigation  of 
the  globe,  with  the  conquest  of  Mexico  and  Peru,  helped 
to  show  how  ignorant  both  saints  and  sages  ha^  been 
throughout  the  past. 

Early  in  the  sixteenth  century  came  the  culmination 
of  that  development  of  artistic  culture  which  had  been 
going  on  rapidly  in  Italy  for  two  hundred  years.  Vainly 
did  the  church  try  to  recover  her  waning  popularity  by 
employing  Leonardo  da  Vinci,  Kaphael  and  Michael 
Angelo.  Her  attempts  to  raise  thought  and  feeling 
above  worldly  objects  were  defeated  by  displaying 
beautiful  portraits  of  notoriously  corrupt  women  for 
worship  as  Madonnas.  Her  favorite  artists  made 
heathen  goddesses  more  attractive  than  Christian  mar- 
tyrs, and  encouraged  such  interest  in  nude  antiques  as 


8  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

put  an  end  to  that  disparagement  of  the  body  which 
had  been  characteristic  of  mediaeval  Christianity. 

The  tendency  to  live  mainly  for  this  world  was  en- 
couraged by  the  growth  of  commerce  and  manufactures, 
especially  in  Flanders,  and  by  a  great  increase  of  com- 
forts and  luxuries,  not  only  there  but  also  in  northern 
and  central  Italy.  Forks  came  into  use  in  the  latter 
country  before  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century,  as  did 
street-lamps  in  Paris  and  fire-engines  in  Germany. 
Chimneys  were  already  common  and  coaches  were  oc- 
casionally used  by  monarchs.  The  invention  of  watches 
and  playing  cards  took  place  before  the  middle  of  the 
sixteenth  century;  and  by  that  time  the  nobility  in 
England  and  Germany,  like  the  middle  as  well  as  the 
upper  classes  in  Italy  and  Flanders,  had  carpets,  table- 
cloths, glass  windows,  and  quite  a  variety  of  garden 
vegetables.  On  the  whole,  and  especially  in  oceanic 
discovery,  art  and  literature,  Italy  had  then  been  cen- 
turies in  advance  of  the  countries  north  of  the  Alps. 

The  secularization  of  thought  was  all  the  more  rapid 
on  account  of  the  lack  of  sanctity  among  the  popes  who 
reigned  between  1294  and  1555.  Some  of  these  pon- 
tiffs were  monsters  of  cruelty  and  lust;  and  the  others, 
with  scarcely  any  exceptions,  cared  much  more  for 
heathen  authors  and  nude  works  of  art  than  for  moral- 
ity and  religion.  Bishops,  cardinals  and  abbots  followed 
these  bad  examples,  and  the  monks  were  so  notoriously 
licentious  that  the  proposal  to  establish  the  Society  of 
Jesus  was  at  first  resisted  by  the  purest  and  wisest  of  the 
cardinals,  lest  more  shame  should  thus  be  cast  upon  the 
church.  Her  corruption  is  attested  by  all  the  writers  of 
the  period,  even  by  sincere  Catholics  like  More  and 
Erasmus,  and  it  led  to  several  very  important  results. 


PROGRESS  OF   FREEDOM.  9 

The  power  to  control  society  which  was  thus  lost  by 
priests  was  gained  by  kings.  The  Tudors  took  advan- 
tage of  the  destruction  of  the  barons,  during  the  Wars 
of  the  Eoses,  to  make  themselves  more  nearly  absolute 
than  any  predecessor  had  been  for  nearly  two  hundred 
years,  or  any  successor  could  be  afterwards.  The  de- 
feat and  death  of  the  mighty  Duke  of  Burgundy  in 
battle  against  the  Swiss,  enabled  Louis  XI.  to  crush 
the  other  great  nobles  of  France  singly  and  establish 
a  despotism  which  had  firm  support  from  Paris.  The 
cities  of  Spain  helped  Ferdinand  and  Isabella  subdue 
the  nobility,  and  were  then  deprived  in  their  turn  of 
political  power.  Two  great  and  wealthy  cities  in  Italy 
still  called  themselves  republics;  but  Venice  had  long 
been  ruled  by  a  few  families  of  nobles,  and  Florence, 
while  preserving  the  semblance  of  government  by  the 
people,  allowed  all  real  authority  to  be  exercised  by 
the  Medici,  one  of  whom  became  duke  in  1530.  The. 
other  cities  in  Italy  north  of  the  States  of  the  Church 
had  already  been  thrown,  by  the  contests  between 
nobles  and  burghers,  into  the  clutches  of  petty  tyrants. 
Neither  liberty  nor  unity  was  yet  possible  south  of  the 
Alps. 

The  power  of  the  German  emperors  was  much  in- 
creased by  the  election,  first  of  Maximilian,  and  then 
of  Charles  V.  Both  were  mighty  sovereigns  by  heredi- 
tary title  before  they  were  chosen;  and  Charles  was 
already  ruler  of  Austria,  the  Netherlands,  Spain,  Naples, 
Sicily  and  the  West  Indies.  Neither  Holland  nor  Bel- 
gium could  prevent  his  suppressing  their  time-honored 
rights;  but,  fortunately  for  Protestantism,  he  never 
ventured  to  assail  Switzerland,  nor  to  try  to  diminish 
the  local  independence  enjoyed  by  the  free  cities  of 


10  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

Germauy.  Local  diets,  composed  of  the  nobles  and 
prelates  in  each  state  and  delegates  from  the  towns,  still 
acted  as  a  check  upon  the  princes,  but  the  latter  greatly 
increased  their  authority  in  the  sixteenth  century, 
while  the  castles  of  robber-knights  were  destroyed  by 
cannon.  This  suppression  of  lawless  licence  should 
not  be  regretted,  but  it  is  sad  to  read  of  the  cruelties 
inflicted  in  Baden,  Wurtemburg  and  Bavaria  on  peas- 
ants in  rebellion  against  an  oppression  which  will  never 
be  restored. 

One  advantage  of  the  substitution  of  lay  for  clerical 
authority  was  that  there  was  little  interference  with 
opinions  not  considered  dangerous  to  the  state.  No 
battles' between  Christians  about  religions  were  fought 
between  1434  and  1531.  No  heretic  appears  to  have 
been  burned  alive  at  Paris  between  1373  and  1525,  or 
in  Scotland  between  1407  and  1528,  or  in  Switzerland 
between  1416  and  1553,  or  in  Germany,  with  the  excep- 
tion of  a  peasant  who  was  also  leader  in  a  rebellion,  be- 
tween 1458  and  1524,  or  in  Italy  between  1500  and 
1546.  It  was  not  at  the  stake  bat  on  the  gallows  that 
Savonarola  died  for  denying  the  infallibility  of  a  wicked 
pope;  and  no  other  Italian  of  note  was  capitally  pun- 
ished for  his  religious  opinions  during  the  fifteenth 
century.  Exceptional  atrocities  were  perpetrated  by 
the  Inquisition  in  Spain  witli  the  permission  of  Queen 
Isabella,  but  the  rest  of  Europe,  including  what  was 
ruled  by  the  Turks,  enjoyed  about  a  hundred  years  of 
unprecedented  toleration  before  persecution  of  Protes- 
tants began  at  Antwerp  in  1523.  The  chance,  and  it 
was  nothing  more  than  a  chance,  of  suppressing  the 
agitation  had  already  been  lost  by  the  good-natured 
indifference  of  Pope  Leo  X. 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  11 

The  establishment  of  the  Reformation  in  England 
was  made  easy  by  the  unwillingness  of  the  chancellor, 
Wolsey,  to  put  heretics  to  death.  Hi8  successor,  More, 
who  went  cheerfully  to  the  scaffold  for  honoring  his 
church  too  much  to  satisfy  his  king,  had  written  a  book 
which  was  read  in  every  language  with  a  living  litera- 
ture and  which  predicts  an  ideal  state  of  society,  where 
everyone  may  hold  and  advocate  whatever  religion  he 
pleases  without  molestation,  while  Atheists  are  to  be 
punished  merely  by  exclusion  from  office  and  prohibi- 
tion to  argue  with  anyone  except  a  priest.  Even  this 
limitation  might  not  have  found  favor  with  Erasmus, 
who  said:  "I  dislike  dogmatism  so  much  that  I  gladly 
rank  myself  among  skeptics,  wherever  this  is  permitted 
by  the  Bible  and  the  church,"  and  who  never  spoke  of 
punishment  for  errors  in  opinion  but  with  indignation. 
Both  he  and  Cornelius  Agrippa  blamed  the  heretic 
who  would  divide  the  church,  but  not  so  severely  as 
the  dissolute,  quarrelsome  monk,  the  despotic  bishop 
and  the  bloody  minded  pope,  who  cared  for  nothing 
but  warfare  to  increase  his  territory. 

Among  other  sincere  but  liberal  Catholics  were  Car- 
dinal Contarini,  who  died  of  grief  at  his  failure  to  rec- 
oncile Protestants  and  Papists  by  urging  mutual  con- 
cessions; Queen  Margaret  of  Navarre,  who  sheltered 
persecuted  authors;  and  the  Chancellor,  L'Hopetal,  who 
enacted  laws  permitting  Huguenots  to  hold  public  wor- 
ship, and  who  said  in  the  king's  name:  "The  sword 
has  no  authority  over  the  soul,"  "God  does  not  wish  to 
have  his  cause  defended  by  weapons."  The  wicked- 
ness of  religious  wars  against  the  heathen  was  main- 
tained in  public  debate,  as  well  as  in  writing,  by  Bishop 
Las  Casas,  who  labored  earnestly  to  emancipate  the 


12  SKETCHES  01?  THE 

enslaved  natives  in  the  West  Indies,  and  who  bitterly  re- 
gretted having  sanctioned,  in  their  interest,  the  practice 
already  introduced  of  importing  negro  bondmen.  It 
is  among  lax  Catholics,  rather  than  among  Protestants 
or  unbelievers,  that  we  should  place  Rabelais,  whose 
pattern  prince  offers  up  this  invocation:  "Thou  art  Al- 
mighty, and  thou  hast  no  need  of  us  to  defend  thy 
cause."  The  inimitable  humorist  does  not  commit 
himself  to  the  support  of  any  form  of  belief  or  disbelief, 
but  he  does  all  he  can  to  represent  persecution  as  hate- 
ful, asceticism  as  ridiculous,  and  the  study  of  things  as 
much  more  important  than  that  of  books.  Among 
other  suggestions  of  great  practical  value  was  the  pro- 
test of  Cornelius  Agrippa  against  exclusion  of  womeu 
from  public  office  and  all  lucrative  and  honorable  pro- 
fessions. 

Inestimable  service  was  rendered  by  Martin  Luther, 
during  what  may  be  called  the  first  period  of  the  Refor- 
mation, that  beginning  in  1517  with  his  attack  on  ped- 
dling licenses  to  sin,  culminating  in  his  defiance  at  the 
Diet  of  Worms  to  both  emperor  and  pope,  and  closing 
as  he  took  his  life  in  his  hands  and  left  the  Wartburg 
in  order  to  put  down  lawless  fanaticism  at  Wittenberg, 
and  publish  his  New  Testament.  In  these  five  years 
of  heroism,  he  called  into  existence  such  a  mighty  op- 
position to  the  tyranny  of  popes,  bishops,  inquisitors 
and  father- confessors  as  soon  made  thought  much  more 
free  north  of  the  Alps  than  would  have  been  the  case  if 
he  had  remained  loyal  to  Rome.  Even  in  those  coun- 
tries which  continued  subject  to  the  old  church  she 
was  kept  thenceforth  on  her  good  behavior,  and  com- 
pelled to  refrain  from  all  persecution  not  fully  sanc- 
tioned by  the  state.  The  new  churches  which  soon 


PROGRESS   OF  FREEDOM.  13 

came  into  existence  in  the  various  Protestant  lands 
were  not  hindered  by  any  foreign  influence  from  be- 
coming an  liberal  as  the  people  wished. 

Among  the  one  hundred  and  thirty-three  books  and 
pamphlets  which  Luther  wrote  and  published  in  1520, 
was  a  vigorous  assertion  of  the  right  of  each  individual 
to  follow  the  Bible  as  he  might  understand  it,  without 
any  danger  of  punishment.  Zwingli,  who  started  an 
independent  movement  in  Switzerland  against  Borne, 
believed  in  the  salvation  of  every  faithful  sonl,  even 
among  the  heathen.  It  was  taught  as  early  as  1529,  at 
Strasburg,  on  the  authority  of  the  "Inner  Light,"  by 
Bunderlin,  that  "Our  oiily  duty  toward  those  who  differ 
from  us  is  to  teach  them  gently."  Three  years  later, 
Servetus,  whose  liberality  was  soon  to  be  punished  piti- 
lessly, closed  one  of  his  early  books  thus:  "It  would  be 
easy  to  separate  truth  from  error,  if  all  men  were  allowed 
to  speak  in  peace.  May  the  Lord  destroy  all  the  tyrants 
of  the  Church.  Amen."  The  German  mystic,  Sebas- 
tian Franck,  said,  in  books  which  had  a  wide  circula- 
tion: "Love  of  liberty  is  implanted  in  every  man  by  the 
free  God."  '-He  is  no  respecter  of  sects;  but  whoever 
does  his  will  is  acceptable  in  his  sight."  "He  has  im- 
parted his  light  to  every  soul." 

Franck,  Servetus,  Erasmus,  More,  Eabelais,  and  other 
writers  against  intolerance  before  1540  were  so  widely 
read,  that  persecution  afterwards  was  decidedly  behind 
the  age.  The  slayers  of  heretics  in  the  latter  half  of 
the  sixteenth  century  must  have  been  as  well  aware  as 
the  slave-holders  in  the  nineteenth,  that  they  were  do- 
ing what  some  of  the  noblest  and  ablest  of  their  con- 
temporaries denounced  as  wicked.  In  murdering  ad- 
vanced thinkers,  and  refusing  to  co-operate  for  mutual 


14  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

defence,  the  early  Protestants  were  led  by  blind  zeal  to 
disregard  what  they  would  otherwise  have  seen  to  be 
plainly  their  duty  to  their  cause.  A  united  Protestant- 
ism would  have  been  strong  enough  to  prevent  religious 
wars  from  devastating  France  in  the  sixteenth  century, 
or  Germany  in  the  seventeenth;  and  a  tolerant  Protest- 
antism would  have  been  greatly  encouraged  by  the 
growth  of  literature  and  science. 

A  mightier  protest  than  even  Luther's  against  the 
authority  of  tradition  was  made  in  1543,  when  Coper- 
nicus announced  the  motion  of  the  eartk  around  the 
sun,  Vesalius  overthrew  the  authority  of  Galen  in  anat- 
omy, and  Ramus  taught  a  sounder  method  of  logic  than 
Aristotle's.  Algebra  was  founded  soon  after  by  Cardan , 
who  represented  the  world  as  the  result  of  natural  forces 
acting  according  to  fixed  laws.  Theology  had  been  ac- 
cepted as  the  great  teacher  for  fifteen  hundred  years, 
but  her  claim  was  now  disputed  by  Science. 

The  Reformation  had  already  passed  beyond  its  yeors 
of  heroism  into  its  second  stage,  a  period  of  reactionary 
controversy  leading  to  great  intolerance.  Burning  of 
heretics  had  become  almost  obsolete,  but  it  was  renewed 
in  1523  in  Belgium  and  Austria,  and  it  soon  became 
once  more  common  in  Catholic  lands.  Protestants,  too, 
punished  thought  with  death,  though  not  at  the  stake, 
before  1550.  This  revival  of  persecution  was  largely 
due  to  the  efforts  of  Luther  and  other  leading  Protest- 
ants to  perpetuate  ancient  dogmas,  which  were  already 
on  trial,  and  are  now  generally  condemned. 

First  among  these,  and  as  cause  of  other  errors,  must 
be  placed  that  belief  in  the  literal  infallibility  of  the 
Bible  which  made  Luther  reject  Copernicus  and  excom- 
municate merchants  for  taking  interest.  He  gave  the 


PROGKESS  OF  FREEDOM.  15 

Landgrave  of  Hesse  license  to  commit  bigamy,  but  Iris 
respect  for  Paul's  prejudices  against  matrimony  made 
him  slow  to  allow  it  to  priests,  monks  and  nuns.  Rev- 
erence  for  the  New  Testament  doctrines  of  non-resist- 
ance and  passive  obedience  made  him  urge  that  the 
rebel  peasants  should  be  slaughtered  like  mad  dogs, 
though  he  admitted  that  their  demands  were  just.  The 
same  scruple  made  him  wait  dangerously  long  before  he 
permitted  his  prince  to  join  that  league  against  the  em- 
peror which  saved  Protestantism  from  being  crushed. 
The  league  was  particularly  objectionable  to  Luther, 
because  some  of  the  members  had  given  up  the  literal 
meaning  of  the  text:  "This  is  my  body."  He  told  one 
of  these  offenders,  Zwingli,  that  he  was  no  Christian. 
They  agreed  about  everything  else,  but  it  was  in  vain 
that  the  Swiss  reformer  offered  his  hand  with  tears  in 
his  eyes.  Zwingli  was  left  to  be  blain  in  a  lost  battle 
against  the  Swiss  Catholics,  but  his  view  was  made  pre- 
dominant among  Protestants  by  Calvin. 

Both  Luther  and  Calvin  were  decidedly  behind  the 
age,  in  comparison  with  Erasmus,  Franck  and  Servetus, 
not  only  in  trying  to  keep  reason  subject  to  scripture, 
but  in  giving  a  new  lease  of  life  to  an  atrocious  old 
dogma  which  had  become  almost  obsolete.  Protestant- 
ism was  for  the  time  committed  to  the  belief  that  only 
a  small  part  of  the  human  race  could  possibly  be  saved, 
and  that  the  vast  majority  were  abandoned  to  sin  and 
ordained  unto  damnation.  This  view  made  it  easy  for 
a  pious  Protestant  to  persecute  those  whom  he  thought 
already  and  forever  under  the  wrath  of  an  angry  God. 

This  doctrine  of  reprobation  was  generally  accepted 
by  Protestents,  and  so  was  that  of  biblical  infallibility. 
Thus  the  Reformation  speedily  became  reactionary, 


16  SKETCHES   OF   THE 

many  liberal  men  remained  lloman  Catholic,  like  Eras- 
mus, and  others  declared,  like  Franck,  that  they  could 
take  no  name  but  that  of  Christian.  This  effect  was 
increased  by  the  endless  controversies,  especially  among 
Lutherans,  over  their  leader's  favorite  dogma  of  justifi- 
cation by  faith  alone.  Nothing  couli  have  succeeded 
better  in  saving  pious  people  from  thinking  priests  and 
ceremonies  necessary  for  salvation.  Erasmus,  however, 
promptly  pointed  out  the  danger  that  belief  might  be 
accepted  as  a  substitute  for  morality;  and  Servetus 
published  in  1531  a  book  warning  all  Christians  that 
virtue  is  not  produced  necessarily  from  faith,  but  needs 
special  effort.  One  of  Luther's  pupils,  named  Thamer, 
was  chaplain  in  the  Protestant  war  against  the  emperor, 
waged  in  1546,  and  did  his  best  to  put  down  lewdness 
and  drunkenness  among  the  soldiers;  but  they  said  to 
him:  "You  tell  us  that  we  must  be  justified  through 
faith  in  Christ  alone,  and  that  good  works  are  of  no 
value  for  salvation.  Why  then  trouble  us  about  moral- 
ity?" Thamer's  eyes  were  opened,  and  he  proposed, 
after  returning  to  Marburg  where  he  was  pastor  and  pro- 
fessor, to  argue  publicly  that  morality  is  necessary  for 
salvation.  The  discussion  was  prohibited,  his  sermons 
in  favor  of  virtue  were  punished  by  banishment,  and  he 
died  a  professor  of  theology  in  a  Roman  Catholic  uni- 
versity. Franck  had  already  declared  that  "We  need 
love  as  well  as  faith  in  order  to  be  saved,"  but  a  Lu- 
theran controversialist  maintained,  in  1559,  that  moral- 
ity could  not  help,  but  might  hinder,  salvation. 

The  reactionary  tendency  of  the  Reformation  was 
largely  due  to  tbe  dogmatism  of  both  Calvin  and  Luther. 
The  latter  said,  in  1524,  to  a  preacher  who  was  banished 
at  his  instigation  for  disbelief  in  the  sacramental  presence 


PROGRESS   OF  FREEDOM.  17 

of  Jesus,  and  who  appealed  to  reason  as  authority,  "Rea- 
son is  the  devil's  harlot,  and  can  do  nothing  but  blas- 
pheme." That  same  >ear  he  was  provoked,  by  the 
admission  of  fondness  for  skepticism  by  Erasmus,  to 
say:  "It  is  characteristic  of  a  Christian's  mind  to  delight 
in  assertions.  The  Christian  wishes  to  be  as  certain  as 
possible,  even  in  things  that  are  unnecessary  and  out- 
side of  Scripture.  Take  away  assertions,  and  you  have 
taken  away  Christianity."  He  was  too  kind-hearted  to 
have  any  man  killed  for  mere  opinions;  but  he  tried  to 
have  Zwingli's  adherents  banished,  and  among  his  last 
books  is  one  advising  that  the  Jews  be  enslaved  and  the 
synagogues  burned.  His  disciples  sent  heretic  after 
heretic  to  the  scaffold.  Interest  in  theology  became  so 
keen  all  over  Germany  as  to  bring  on  her,  during  the 
seventeenth  century,  the  worst  war  ever  waged  for  re- 
ligion, while  the  great  poets  of  the  sixteenth,  Hutten, 
Sachs  and  Fischart,  had  no  successor  until  long  after- 
wards. It  is  doubtful  whether  any  German  painter  has 
yet  appeared  equal  to  Luther's  contemporaries,  Holbein, 
Durer  and  Cranach;  and  there  is  much  truth  in  these 
lines  of  dough's  (Amours  de  Voyage,  Canto  I.  v.): 

"Luther,  they  saj",  was  unwise;  like  a  half-taught  German,  he 
could  not 

See  that  old  follies  were  passing  most  tranquilly  out  of  re- 
membrance." 

"He  mu..t,  forsooth,  make  a  fuss,  and  distend  his  huge  Witten- 
berg lungs  and 
Bring  back  Theology  once  yet  again  in  a  flood  upon  Europe." 

Nowhere  was  this  deluge  more  destructive  than  at 
Geneva,  where  religious  interests  became  so  absorbing 
that  Calvin  was  able  to  establish  such  proscription  of 
amusements  as  had  never  before  been  attempted.  A 
woman  was  whipped  for  singing  ordinary  words  to  a 


18  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

psalm  tune;  and  among  the  criminals  sent  to  prison 
were  a  whole  family  who  had  allowed  dancing  at  a  wed- 
ding, a  bride  who  had  gone  to  church  with  her  hair 
hanging  down  too  far,  and  a  man  who  had  read  an  in- 
decent book.  Four  hundred  people  were  punished,  in 
1558  and  1559,  for  dancing,  laughing  in  church,  dress- 
ing loo  gaily,  and  similar  offences.  Novel-reading, 
theatricals  and  games  of  chance,  were  strictly  prohib- 
ited, and  staying  away  from  church  became  criminal  for 
the  first  time  in  history. 

Desire  to  obey  the  Bible  literally  caused  a  hundred 
and  fifty  witches  to  be  burned  within  sixty  years,  and 
it  was  at  Calvin's  request  that  a  citizen  of  Geneva, 
named  Gruet,  was  put  on  the  rack  for  disrespect  to  the 
clergy,  and  beheaded  as  a  blasphemer.  A  paper  had 
been  found  in  his  house,  proving  that  he  had  written 
these  shocking  words:  "If  I  wish  to  dance  and  enjoy 
myself,  what  have  just  laws  to  do  with  that?  Nothing." 
The  cross-examination  brought  out  his  disbelief  that 
the  State  has  any  right  to  punish  conduct  which  injures 
no  one,  however  contrary  to  scripture.  He  was  also 
charged  at  his  trial  with  disbelief  in  Moses;  but  it  was 
not  until  some  years  after  his  execution  that  he  was 
discovered  to  have  written  a  manuscript,  which  was 
promptly  destroyed,  and  which  was  said  to  be  grossly 
anti-Christian  by  the  bigot  who  afterwards  bore  false 
witness  against  Servetus.  Gruet's  real  offence  was  die- 
like  of  persecution ;  and  the  wickedness  of  shedding  his 
bloed  was  aggravated  by  the  failure  of  his  petition,  con- 
ceding that  he  had  done  wrong  and  promising  amend- 
ment, to  find  such  favor  with  Calvin  and  the  magistrates 
of  Geneva  a&  would  probably  have  been  given  by  the 
Inquisition. 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  19 

Calvin's  most  famous  victim  was  Servetus,  who  had 
been  obliged  to  take  refuge  in  France  under  an  assumed 
name  because  he  had  published  a  book  which  Luther 
called  horribly  wicked.  He  had  asserted  that  the  per- 
sons in  the  Trinity  are  merely  attributes,  insisted  on  the 
necessity  of  morality,  and  denied  the  pre-existence  of 
Jesus.  In  his  exclusion  from  Protestant  lands  he  be- 
came a  physician,  and  discovered  that  the  blood  moves 
through  the  lungs.  He  aroused  no  opposition  among 
Catholics  by  teaching  that  the  only  way  to  understand 
the  Bible  or  any  other  book  correctly,  is  to  accept  it  as 
written  directly  for  readers  in  the  author's  own  day. 
This  success  made  him  venture  to  write  his  "Restora- 
tion of  Christianity,"  where  he  treated  the  principal 
rites  and  doctrines  of  both  Protestants  and  Catholics 
with  unprecedented  boldness.  He  sent  a  copy  in  man- 
uscript to  Calvin,  who  wrote  to  one  of  his  friends  a  let- 
ter, still  extant,  declaring  that  if  the  author  should  ever 
come  to  Geneva,  "I  will  never  suffer  him  to  depart 
alive."  Servetus  wrote  soon  after  to  another  clergy- 
man: "I  am  sure  I  shall  die  fcr  this;  but  I  do  not  falter 
in  soul,  for  I  would  be  a  disciple  like  the  Master." 

The  book  was  printed  secretly  in  France,  where 
Servetus  resided,  but  all  the  copies  were  seized  before 
any  could  be  sold,  and  he  was  arrested  as  the  author. 
This  was  in  consequence  of  a  letter  from  Geneva,  de- 
claring that  the  physician  ought  to  be  burned  alive.  He 
was  discharged  for  lack  of  evidence,  but  the  case  against 
him  became  complete  when  his  letters  to  Calvin  were 
seat  on  by  the  latter  to  be  used  by  the  Inquisition. 
Servetus  was  then  confined  in  prison,  but  he  escaped, 
and  spent  some  months  wandering  to  and  fro.  The 
news  that  he  was  in  hiding  at  Geneva  was  brought  one 


20  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

Sunday  to  Calvin,  who  had  him  arrested  that  very  day. 

The  only  charge  against  him  was  his  opinions;  these 
had  never  been  published  or  uttered  in  Geneva,  and  no 
heretic  was  liable  to  any  penalty  worse  than  banish- 
ment by  her  laws,  but  he  was  at  once  put  on  trial  for 
his  life.  The  leading  prosecutor  was  Calvin,  who  also 
preached  against  Servetus  and  wrote  a  letter  expressing 
the  hope  that  he  would  be  put  to  death.  The  charges 
presented  against  him  were  drawn  up  by  Calvin,  and  in- 
cluded disrespect  toward  the  latter,  sedition  in  fleeing 
from  the  Inquisition,  irreverence  toward  the  Old  Testa- 
ment, denial  of  the  pre-existence  of  Jesus,  of  the  dam- 
nation of  unbaptized  babies,  and  of  the  efficacy  of  in- 
fant baptism,  as  well  as  disbelief  in  immortality.  The 
last  charge  was  utterly  false,  and  was  promptly  denied 
by  Servetus,  who  asked  in  vain  for  legal  advice. 

He  pleaded  that  he  had  done  nothing  worse  than 
suggest  abstruse  problems  to  scholars  and  that  heretics 
ought  not  to  be  put  to  death.  A  violent  discussion  on 
that  point  took  place  between  him  and  Calvin,  who  re- 
peated the  false  charge  of  disbelf  in  immortality  when 
he  drew  up  a  new  list  of  heresies,  mainly  about  pre- 
existence,  for  consideration  by  the  ministers  and  magis- 
trates of  Basel,  Bern,  Schaffhausen  and  Zurich.  They 
decided  in  favor  of  capital  punishment,  and  the  court 
of  magistrates  at  Geneva  voted  that  Servetus  be  burned 
alive,  according  to  an  ancient  law  which  had  been  re- 
pealed ten  years  before.  Calvin  tried  to  have  the  sword 
substituted  for  the  stake;  but  Servetus  perished  in  the 
flames,  with  a  crown  of  leaves  and  straw  covered  with 
sulphur  on  his  head,  and  at  his  waist  a  printed  copy  of 
his  last  book,  together  with  the  manuscript  which  he 
had  loaned  to  Calvin  and  had  been  unable  to  recover. 


PROGRESS  OF   FREEDOM.  21 

Green  wood  was  used  to  prolong  his  sufferings,  which 
lasted  half  an  hour.  With  him  perished  every  copy  but 
two  of  his  book,  which  was  known  only  by  name  until 
late  in  the  eighteenth  century,  while  his  discovery  about 
the  blood,  fully  stated  therein,  had  to  be  made  anew 
and  published  independently.  His  murder  was  cen- 
sured severely  by  advanced  thinkers  like  Castalio  and 
the  uncle  of  that  Socinus  who  became  the  founder  of 
Socinianism,  but  most  of  the  orthodox  approved  of  burn- 
ing Secvetus. 

The  Reformation  had  already  passed  beyond  its  second 
period,  that  of  reactionary  conservatism  with  incidental 
persecution.  This  was  all  the  more  cruel  on  account 
of  the  alarm  created  among  both  Catholics  and  Protest- 
ants by  the  Anabaptists,  revolutionary  mystics,  among 
whom  there  was  much  opposition  to  ail  ceremonies, 
dogmas  and  institutions.  The  third  and  last  stage  of 
the  Reformation,  its  bloody  period,  began  with  the  re- 
ligious war  of  1546,  in  Germany,  and  closed  there  with 
the  thirty  years'  war  in  1648.  The  burning  of  Servetus, 
in  1553,  was  soon  surpassed  in  horror  by  the  Massacre 
of  St.  Bartholomew.  War  after  war  cursed  France  dur- 
ing the  latter  part  of  this  century;  and  it  was  only  by 
losing  thousands  of  lives,  both  on  the  scaffold  and  in 
battle,  and  suffering  every  other  calamity,  that  the 
Dutch  achieved  political  and  mental  independence. 

In  England,  the  Reformation  had  no  years  of  hero- 
ism and  no  religious  wars  before  1642.  Between  that 
year  and  1558,  when  persecutions  of  Protestants  ceased 
at  the  accession  of  Elizabeth,  there  was  a  lucid  inter- 
val when  there  was  much  less  controversy  than  on  the 
Continent,  and  much  more  progress  in  manufactures, 
commerce,  literature  and  science.  Subordination  of 


22  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

theological  to  practical  interests  was  easy  because  the 
Reformation  had  been  much  more  closely  confined  in 
England  than  in  Germany  to  attacking  the  rapacity  of 
the  clergy.  The  people  were  satisfied  with  the  old 
creeds  and  ceremonies,  and  the  bishops  said  that  no 
"notable  person"  had  fallen  into  heresy  in  their  time. 
They  did  complain  that  some  "idle  fellows  of  corrupt 
intent"  were  propagating  Luther's  views;  and  punish- 
ment of  this  offence  by  burning  alive  was  occasionally 
inflicted  during  the  period  of  sixteen  years,  beginning 
with  1531.  In  that  year,  however,  the  convocation  of 
the  clergy  were  forced  by  King  Henry  VIII.  to  acknowl- 
edge him  as  supreme  and  only  Head  of  the  Church, 
and  they  concurred  soon  after  with  Parliament  in  allow- 
ing him  to  put  away  his  wife.  This  he  did  to  gratify 
a  lawless  love  which  found  no  approval  at  Rome;  but 
the  authority  of  the  pope  was  renounced  by  Parliament 
at  the  same  time  that  an  oath  was  imposed  acknowl- 
edging that  the  divorce  was  legal,  that  the  children  by 
the  new  marriage  were  heirs  to  the  crown,  and  that  the 
king  was  Head  of  the  Church.  Among  the  Catholics 
beheaded  for  refusing  to  do  violence  to  conscience  by 
swearing  thus  was  the  author  of  "Utopia." 

The  breach  with  Rome  was  made  irreparable  by  th« 
suppression  of  the  abbeys;  for  the  wealth  thus  acquired 
was  for  the  most  part  given  to  influential  people,  whose 
refusal  to  make  restitution  committed  them  to  hostility 
against  the  pope.  It  is  probable  that  love  of  spoil  was 
quite  as  powerful  with  Parliament  and  with  the  king 
himself  as  horror  at  the  vices  of  the  monks  and  nuns. 
Neither  they  nor  the  parish  priests  were  permitted  to 
marry  during  the  reign  of  Henry  VIII.;  the  doctrine 
of  justification  by  faith  alone  continued  under  condem- 


PROGRESS  OF   FREEDOM.  23 

nation,  and  opposition  to  auricular  confession  or  tran- 
substautiation  remained  a  capital  crime.  The  saintly 
Anne  Ascue  was  burned  for  such  heresy  in  1546.  The 
circulation  of  the  Bible  in  English  was  permitted  but 
not  much  encouraged  by  the  government.  The  servil- 
ity of  Parliament  was  increased,  as  the  withdrawal  of 
the  abbots  made  the  lay  peers  a  majority  in  the  House 
of  Lords,  where  they  had  hitherto  been  greatly  out- 
numbered; but  this  made  it  easy  for  both  houses  to 
support  the  king  in  a  policy  which,  despite  its  intoler- 
ance, was  utterly  irreligious.  The  English  Reforma- 
tion was  not  directed  like  the  German  and  Swiss  agi- 
tations, against  the  theology  of  Rome,  but  rather 
against  her  rapacity.  Too  little  was  done  to  check  the 
vices  of  the  clergy  and  too  much  to  encourage  those  of 
the  king. 

Protestantism  did  advance  in  England  for  half-a- 
dozen  years  after  the  death  of  Henry  VIII.,  but  it  was 
checked  by  the  accession,  in  1553,  three  months  before 
the  burning  of  Servetus,  of  a  queen  who  soon  became 
infamous  as  the  Bloody  Mary.  Her  atrocities  began 
the  same  year,  1555,  that  the  Protestants  obtained  tol- 
eration in  Germany,  and  that  Philip  II.  became  ruler 
of  the  Netherlands  in  place  of  his  father,  who  had 
already  put  to  death  fifty  thousand  heretics  in  Holland 
and  Belgium.  Persecution  ceased  in  England  with  the 
life  of  the  queen  in  1558,  when  the  great  majority  of 
the  people,  and  even  of  the  priests,  renounced  Catholi- 
cism as  coolly  as  they  had  given  up  Protestantism  but 
five  years  and  four  months  earlier.  Neither  religion 
had  any  firm  hold  of  the  people's  heart.  There  had 
been  altogether  too  much  servility,  rapacity  and  profli- 
gacy among  the  prominent  representatives  of  both 


24  SKETCHES   OF   THE 

forms  of  faith,  and  Catholicism  had  of  late  years  shown 
itself  hatefully  cruel. 

The  Reformation  had  not  yet  been  established  as 
completely  in  England  as  it  was  in  Geneva,  northern 
Germany  and  the  Scandinavian  lands;  but,  on  the  other 
hand,  it  had  not  been  suppressed  so  thoroughly  as  was 
the  case  in  southern  Europe.  Neither  its  suppression 
nor  its  establishment  proved  favorable  to  the  advance 
of  the  Renaissance.  That  great  secularization  of 
1  bought  had  been  carrying  everything  before  it  at  the 
beginning  of  the  century  to  the  rapid  promotion  of  tol- 
eration as  well  as  of  literature,  art,  commerce  and  in- 
dustrial prosperity;  but  these  activities  were  now  ar- 
rested everywhere  except  in  England.  That  country 
was  so  far  from  Italy,  the  cradle  of  the  Renaissance, 
and,  as  yet,  so  illiterate,  that  English  literature  was 
still  in  its  infancy.  Great  industrial  progress  was  going 
on,  however,  aa  we  shall  see  later;  and  it  will  then  be 
shown  how  England  succeeded  before  the  end  of  the 
century  in  combining  a  little  more  of  the  Reformation 
with  a  great  deal  more  of  the  Renaissance.  This  en- 
bled  the  nation  to  produce  Shakespeare,  Bacon  and 
their  brilliant  contemporaries  at  a  time  when  there  was 
no  other  literature  of  equal  value.  If  England  had  had 
more  martyrs  she  might  had  fewer  poets. 

The  peculiar  circumstances  under  which  Elizabeth 
mounted  the  throne  in  1558  were  so  much  in  harmony 
with  her  own  taste  and  character,  as  well  as  with  the 
wishes  of  her  people,  as  to  enable  the  nation  to  hold 
throughout  her  reign  a  position  singularly  favorable, 
not  only  to  the  general  prosperity  but  to  the  brilliant 
success  of  those  great  dramas,  poems,  novels,  histories 
and  scientific  works,  which  were  published  in  England 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  25 

during  the  glorious  years  beginning  A.D.  1587  and 
closing  A.D.  1620.  Marlowe's  "Tamburlane"  was 
acted  in  1587  and  Bacon's  "Novum  Organum"  was 
printed  in  1520. 

How  singularly  fortunate  the  English  were  during 
her  reign  is  plain  from  a  comparison  of  their  condition 
with  that  of  the  neighboring  nations.  Ireland  was 
still  sunk  in  mediaeval  darkness  and  destitution.  The 
Scandinavian  kingdoms  had  received  the  Reformation 
without  the  Renaissance,  and  the  latter  government 
gained  very  little  from  the  establishment  of  Protes- 
tanism  in  Scotland  by  insurrection  in  1560.  Reaction 
against  the  Reformation  had  led  to  its  suppression  in 
Spain  and  Italy,  as  well  as  to  destruction  of  the  origi- 
nality and  brilliancy  of  the  Renaissance.  Philip  II. 
was  already  persecuting  the  Netherlander  most  cruelly 
and  France  was  soon  to  be  rent  asunder  by  the  plan 
which  he  had  made  in  conspiracy  with  her  king  and 
the  Pope  for  destroying  all  the  Protestants  everywhere. 

The  toleration  which  had  been  introduced  by  L'Hop- 
ital  was  frustrated  in  1562  by  a  bloody  attack  on  Hu- 
guenots engaged  in  worship,  and  fighting  went  on  with 
but  short  intermission  until  1594,  when  Paris  opened 
her  gates  to  the  new  king,  whose  title  was  recognized 
throughout  France  and  even  at  Rome,  Henry  of  Na- 
varre. Instead  of  the  nine  Huguenot  wars,  during 
these  thirty-two  years,  enumerated  by  historians,  it  is 
better  to  speak  of  two.  The  lesser,  in  which  Coligni 
was  leader,  ended  with  the  truce  of  St.  Germain  in 
1570.  The  greater,  under  Henry  of  Navarre,  began 
soon  after  the  massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew  in  1572, 
when  Coligni  was  among  the  twenty  thousand  slaugh- 
tered heretics.  Indignation  at  this  butchery  brought 


26  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

those  liberal  Catholics  who  called  themselves  "the 
Politic"  to  support  Henry  of  Navarre,  but  conformity 
to  the  Church  of  Borne  was  exacted  before  he  was 
allowed  to  give  peace  to  France  and  nearly  eighty 
years  of  toleration  to  the  Huguenots. 

There  was  so  much  bigotry  on  both  sides  during 
these  wars  as  to  strengthen  that  tendency  to  irreligion 
which  caused  sixty  editions  of  Rabelais  to  be  published 
in  the  sixteenth  century.  An  author  was  hung  soon 
after  the  massacre  of  1572  for  declaring  that  there  is 
more  happiness  for  the  sceptic,  who  never  believes  nor 
disbelieves  but  is  incessantly  in  doubt,  than  for  all  the 
believers.  There  was  nothing  but  popularity,  however, 
for  Montaigne,  who  took  sides  against  the  Huguenots, 
but  who  won  readers  all  over  Europe  for  his  brilliant 
"Essays,"  published  in  1580,  and  irresistibly  severe 
against  execution  of  heretics,  torture  of  criminals  and 
belief  in  witchcraft.  His  longest  and  ablest  chapter  is 
devoted  to  proving  that  it  is  for  our  happiness  to  keep 
our  minds  in  as  complete  suspense  and  freedom  from 
all  pressure  of  authority  as  is  permitted  by  the  church 
that  rules  us.  The  mottoes  still  legible  on  the  walls  of 
his  study  are  in  harmony  with  many  passages,  espe- 
cially in  his  latest  "Essays,"  like  these:  "I  hate  every 
kind  of  tyranny;"  "Assertion  and  obstinacy  are  special 
marks  of  stupidity;"  "He  who  contradicts  me  is  my 
teacher,  for  the  cause  of  truth  is  mine  as  well  as  his;" 
"Contrary  opinions  do  not  hurt  or  offend  me  but  only 
keep  me  in  practice  and  wide  awake." 

One  year  later  the  Dutch  declared  themselves  inde- 
pendent of  the  mighty  monarch  who  had  planned  the 
universal  destruction  of  Protestantism  and  had  sent 
Alva  to  the  Netherlands,  where  the  duke  had  eighteen 


PROGRESS   OF  FREEDOM.  27 

thousand  heretics  executed  with  atrocious  tortures. 
Just  before  the  massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew,  a  revolt 
had  broken  out  in  Holland  and  been  punished  that 
same  year,  1572,  by  sacking  cities  amid  such  outrages 
as  are  not  tolerated  at  present  in  war,  and  butchering 
prisoners  by  hundreds.  The  Spanish  soldiers  were  the 
most  terrible  yet  known,  but  the  Dutch  were  ready  to 
meet  instant  death  or  to  endure  the  utmost  pangs  of 
famine  in  beleagured  cities.  Leyden  actually  held  out 
for  weeks  after  all  wholesome  food  was  exhausted,  and 
while  people  were  dying  of  hunger  and  pestilence  by 
thousands  daily,  until  the  liberators  were  enabled  to 
sail  in  on  a  flood  which  the  peasants  and  farmers  let  in 
cheerfully  to  destroy  their  own  fields.  The  Dutch  were 
better  sailors,  as  well  as  better  patriots,  than  the  Span- 
iards; and  the  latter  were  driven  finally  out  of  Holland 
in  1590,  the  same  year  that  Henry  of  Navarre  gained 
the  decisive  battle  of  Ivry  over  the  league  of  bigoted 
Catholics. 

The  success  of  the  Dutch  is  particularly  gratifying, 
because  they  were  champions  of  liberty,  not  for  them- 
selves alone,  but  for  all  mankind.  Their  leader,  Wil- 
liam of  Orange,  began  publicly,  in  1566,  his  efforts  to 
make  Catholics  and  Protestants  trust  each  other  as  broth- 
ers. During  the  twelve  years  from  the  beginning  of 
the  war  against  Catholic  persecutors,  in  1572,  until  his 
murder  by  a  Catholic  assassin,  he  insisted  sternly  that 
peaceable  Catholics  should  not  be  molested.  Protes- 
tants preached  against  him  for  this  as  a  man  without 
religion;  but  he  went  on  to  establish  toleration  in  1577 
for  Romanists,  and  in  1578  for  even  Anabaptists,  who 
were  thought  elsewhere  to  be  fit  only  to  be  burned 
alive.  He  was  advised  to  exclude  them  from  citizen- 


28  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

ship  because  they  would  not  swear  allegiance  to  the 
republic  of  which  he  was  chief  magistrate ;  but  he  re- 
fused indignantly,  saying:  "Their  yea  is  as  good  as  our 
oath."  "Our  pot,"  he  added,  "has  not  gone  to  the  fire 
so  often  as  that  of  our  enemies,  but  when  the  time 
comes  it  will  be  black  enough." 

His  authority  prevailed  all  the  easier  because  the 
Spaniards  were  so  strong  that  no  recruit  against  them 
could  safely  be  rejected  on  account  of  differences  in 
religion;  and  one  of  the  first  results  of  peace  was  active 
commerce  of  the  Dutch,  not  only  with  Lutheran,  Epis- 
copalian and  Catholic  lands,  but  with  Eussia,  Turkey 
and  India.  This  toleration  became^one  of  the  funda- 
mental principles  of  the  republic.  Before  the  close  of 
the  century,  Holland  made  a  treaty  with  the  Sultan, 
and  allowed  synagogues  to  be  built  by  the  Jews,  who 
were  still  totally  excluded  or  else  wickedly  oppressed 
by  every  Christian  nation  but  this. 

In  deciding  not  to  punish  people  for  differences  about 
religion,  the  Dutch  were  at  least  a  century  in  advance 
of  every  other  Protestant  nation,  two  in  advance  of 
Catholic  Europe,  and  more  than  three  in  advance  of 
Kussia.  Holland  at  once  adopted  the  correction  of  the 
calendar  introduced  by  Pope  Gregory  XIII.  in  1582, 
Protestant  Germany  yielded  in  1700,  but  England  held 
out  until  1752,  preferring  to  make  believe  that  events 
took  place  eleven  days  earlier  than  was  actually  the  case, 
rather  than  be  set  right  by  a  pope. 

Protestantism  on  the  whole,  however,  was  much  more 
friendly  than  Catholicism  to  the  advance  of  knowledge. 
Ssaroely  had  Galileo  proved  by  aid  of  the  telescope  that 
the  earth  moves  around  the  sun,  when  he  was  told  at 
Rome  that  both  the  Church  and  the  Bible  required  him 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  29 

to  keep  silence.  He  evaded  the  injunction,  and  was 
summoned  to  Some  in  1633,  when  he  was  threatened 
with  torture  by  a  court  over  which  the  pope  presided, 
forced  to  recant,  and  sentenced  to  imprisonment  for 
life.  The  Church  put  his  book,  as  well  as  that  of  Co- 
pernicus, under  a  ban,  which  was  not  repealed  before 
1835.  It  was  in  that  intensely  Catholic  city,  Toulouse, 
that  the  last  noted  author  who  was  condemned  to  death 
for  writing  irreverently,  Vanini,  was  strangled  at  the 
stake  in  1619.  He  had  aggravated  his  guilt  by  denying 
that  there  could  be  ghosts,  witches,  or  possession  by 
devils,  and  even  suggesting  that  negroes  sprang  from 
apes,  and  men  generally  from  the  lower  animals. 

Another  skeptical  Italian,  Giordano  Bruno,  found  his 
arguments  in  support  of  Copernicus  received  favorably 
at  Oxford,  but  punished  by  expulsion  from  Paris.  The 
comparatively  tolerant  city  of  Venice  suffered  him  to 
be  arrested  by  the  Inquisition,  and  Kome  sentenced  him 
to  the  fiery  death  which  he  met  most  bravely  on  Thurs- 
day, February  17, 1600.  Among  his  crimes  was  main- 
taining that  there  is  more  than  one  inhabitable  world ; 
and  he  was  also  charged  with  disbelief  in  Christianity. 
His  faith  in  the  unity  of  all  phenomena  and  the  sov- 
ereignty of  transcendent  laws  made  him  very  skeptical 
about  miracles,  as  may  be  seen  in  his  "Expulsion  of  the 
Triumphant  Beast."  This  allegory  was  written  "to 
hasten  the  time  when  good  deeds  shall  no  longer  be 
thought  worthless  for  salvation,  nor  credulity  be  hon- 
ored more  than  wisdom."  It  is  proposed  that  the  pole- 
star  be  called  "Truth,"  that  the  names  "Toleration" 
and  "Liberty  of  Thought"  be  given  to  prominent  con- 
stellations, and  that  the  Northern  Crown  bear  the  name 
of  some  future  destroyer  of  that  pernicious  sect  which 


30  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

thinks  morality  worthless  and  sin  foreordained.  This 
dialogue  also  protests  against  that  inequality  of  property 
which  allows  some  to  feast  while  others  starve.  In  an- 
other work  he  declares  that  nothing  ennobles  the  soul 
like  love  of  truth.  "What  path  of  truth  he  followed  is 
shown  by  his  satire  on  credulity,  which  may  be  trans- 
lated from  the  Italian  thus: 

"O  saintly  Asininity,  O  pious  foolishness  1 

More  mighty  thou  to  lead  the  sonl  in  paths  of  righteousness 

Than  all  our  pride  of  intellect,  which  ne'er  can  entrance  gain 

To  heaven.    There  the  student's  toil  is  all  accounted  vain ; 

But  there  thou  buildest  palaces  in  which  no  scholars  dwell. 

Ah,  what  availeth  the  attempt  Dame  Nature's  ways  to  tell, 

And  find  out  if  the  stars  are  flames,  or  only  lands  and  seas? 

The  holy  Asininity  cares  not  for  facts  like  these. 

Her  knees  are  bent ;   her  hands  are  clasped ;    she  looketh  up  to 

him 
From  whom  she  hopes  eternal  rest,  when  Wisdom's  crown  is 

dim." 

That  so  advanced  a  thinker  as  Giordano  Bruno  was 
received  exceptionally  well  in  England  is  precisely 
what  might  have  been  expected  from  a  nation  where 
there  had  been  but  little  opposition,  either  to  the  sub- 
stitution of  Catholicism  for  Protestantism  in  1553,  or  to 
the  repudiation  of  Catholicism  in  1558.  The  cruelty 
recently  displayed  by  the  old  Church  had  made  her 
deeply  hated  in  England;  but  Protestantism  had  not 
yet  been  preached  there  freely,  except  during  the  britf 
reign  of  Edward  VI.,  and  its  chief  supporters  had  beeu 
Somerset,  who  sent  his  brother  to  the  scaffold  for  such 
ambition  as  soon  brought  on  his  own  execution,  and 
Northumberland,  who  confessed  as  he  was  about  to  die 
the  death  of  a  traitor  that  he  had  always  been  a  Catho- 
lic at  heart.  Literary  habits  were  not  yet  common  in 


PBOGRES8  OF  FREEDOM.  31, 

England,  but  Erasmus,  Ariosto  and  Kabelais  won  more 
readers  than  Luther  or  Calvin.  The  people  were  still 
fond  of  Catholic  rites  and  ceremonies,  with  the  excep- 
tion of  the  burnt-offerings;  but  there  was  a  decided  ob- 
jection to  paying  more  tribute  to  Kome,  or  placing  the 
clergy  again  above  the  laws  of  the  land. 

It  was  this  neutral  condition  of  popular  feeling  which 
enabled  a  girl  of  twenty-five  to  make  the  Church  of 
England  substantially  what  it  has  continued  to  be  down 
to  the  present  day.  Elizabeth's  own  religion  was  mod- 
erately Catholic,  bur  her  title  was  exclusively  Protest- 
ant. The  Church  of  Rome  had  never  sanctioned  the 
marriage  which  made  her  heir  to  King  Henry  VIII. ; 
the  pope  declared  her  to  be  a  usurper  as  well  as  a  bas- 
tard; and  her  firmest  supporters  clung  to  her  as  the 
only  refuge  from  having  a  persecutor  of  Protestantism 
on  the  throne.  This  state  of  things  outweighed  thoge 
tastes,  implanted  by  early  education,  which  made  her 
delight  in  the  pomp  of  the  Catholic  ritual,  worship  the 
Virgin  to  the  last  in  a  closet  where  candles  burned  be- 
fore a  crucifix,  and  oppose  marriage  of  priests  all 
through  her  reign.  Her  dislike  of  Protestantism  was 
kept  alive  by  the  revolutionary  tendency  which  it  dis- 
played in  Scotland  as  well  as  on  the  continent,  and  she 
had  no  wish  to  give  King  Philip  any  excuse  for  attack- 
ing England,  as  he  finally  did.  She  had  to  favor  Prot- 
estantism more  than  Catholicism,  or  her  reign  would 
have  been  very  short;  but  the  rites  which  she  and  her 
court  celebrated  most  zealously  were  held  in  honor  of 
Ap'ollo  and  the  Muses. 

One  of  her  first  measures  was  to  stop  the  persecution 
of  Protestants;  but  the  new  laws  against  heresy  were  so 
framed  as  not  to  touch  Roman  Catholics.  Anabaptists, 


32  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

Unitarians  and  Atheists,  however,  remained  liable  to 
the  fiery  penalty,  for  such  views  were  considered  dan- 
gerous to  the  State.  Performance  of  Catholic  ceremo- 
nies, even  in  private,  was  promptly  forbidden,  and  ab- 
sence from  church  became  punishable  by  fine,  but  the 
"Order  for  Prayer,"  then  imposed  and  still  in  use,  says 
nothing  against  the  Church  of  Eome,  and  decidedly  fa- 
vors her  position  that  morality  is  necessary  for  admit- 
tance to  heaven.  In  fact,  the  English  Catholics  were 
so  well  satisfied  that  they  asked  the  pope  to  permit  them 
to  attend  service,  a  request  which  was  prudently  re- 
fused. Catholics  and  Protestants  were  on  much  better 
terms  in  England  than  anywhere  else  until  1577,  when 
toleration  was  proclaimed  in  Holland. 

Elizabeth  had  reigned  for  ten  years  without  putting 
a  single  heretic  or  traitor  to  death  when  a  Catholic  re- 
bellion broke  out,  in  1569,  with  the  approval  of  the 
pope  and  at  the  instigation  of  Philip.  The  latter  was 
thenceforth  deep  in  conspiracies  for  her  assassination. 
Many  Romanists  were  beheaded  as  rebels  or  conspira- 
tors, an  excuse  which  seems  fairly  applicable  to  the  ex- 
ecution of  Mary  Stewart  in  1587  but  not  to  that  of  some 
subsequent  victims,  who  died  merely  for  worshiping  as 
conscience  ordained.  No  one  was  burned  to  death  in 
this  reign  on  account  of  religion  before  1575,  when  this 
wicked  penalty  was  inflicted  on  two  Anabaptists.  It 
was  afterwards  employed  against  two  Unitarians  and  an 
Atheist.  Few  Englishmen  knew  what  wide  differences 
in  religion  could  exist  without  becoming  politically  dan- 
gerous; and  there  must  have  been  very  little  humanity 
in  a  nation  where  the  queen  did  not  lose  her  popularity 
by  laughing  heartily  at  a  theatrical  performance,  in 
spite  of  its  having  been  interrupted  by  an  accident  in 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  33 

which  three  lives  had  been  lost  before  her  eyes.  She 
never  spared  man  or  woman  who  blocked  her  way,  but 
that  way  Was  of  the  world  worldly,  and  she  never  went 
out  of  it  in  order  to  persecute  for  the  sake  of  religion. 

Among  the  results  of  the  Catholic  insurrection  was 
the  enactment  in  1571  of  the  Thirty-nine  Articles,  which 
carried  England  finally  out  of  the  Koman  Catholic 
Church.  They  repudiated  some  of  the  doctrines  on 
which  that  Church  still  insists,  and  asserted  that  justi- 
fication must  be  by  faith  alone.  They  would  have  been 
imposed  earlier,  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  opposition  of 
the  queen  to  the  open  wish  of  Parliament  as  well  as  of 
the  clergy.  It  is  supposed  to  be  due  to  her  that  the 
first  clause  of  Article  XX.  was  inserted,  to  the  abridg- 
ment of  the  rights  of  private  judgment,  as  well  as  that 
the  custom  of  bowing  at  the  name  of  Jesus  was  retained ; 
and  Episcopalians  in  America,  as  well  as  in  England, 
still  do  what  she  wished. 

The  passage  of  the  Thirty-nine  Articles  in  1571  shows 
the  strength  of  Puritanism  in  Parliament.  The  zealous 
Protestants,  who  had  fled  to  Switzerland  before  the 
wrath  of  the  Bloody  Mary  and  returned  to  welcome 
Elizabeth,  brought  back  with  them  not  only  Calvin's 
theology  but  his  dislike  of  gorgeous  ceremonies  and  of 
amusements.  This  ascetic  tendency  led,  before  the 
close  of  the  century,  to  prohibition  of  recreation  on 
Sunday.  The  day  had  hitherto  been  observed  on  ec- 
clesiastical authority  as  a  Church  festival,  like  Christ- 
mas, and  had  been  selected  for  the  coronation  of  seven 
English  kings,  while  the  name  Sabbath  was  applied 
only  to  Saturday,  according  to  New  Testament  usage. 
In  1595  a  Puritan,  named  Bownde,  introduced  what 
an  Episcopalian  divine  in  the  next  century  called  "the 


34  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

most  bewitching  error"  and  "the  most  popular  deceit," 
of  shuffling  Sunday  into  the  place  held  by  Saturday 
among  the  Jews,  and  thus  making  Sunday  amusements 
appear  to  be  forbidden  by  God.  The  object  of  this 
claim  was  exposed  by  Bownde  himself,  as  follows: 
'•This  is  the  chiefest  end  of  all  government,  that  men 
might  not  profess  what  religion  they  list,  and  serve  God 
after  what  manner  it  pleaseth  them  best,  but  that  God's 
true  worship  might  be  set  up  everywhere,  and  all  men 
compelled  to  stoop  unto  it." 

A  controversy  has  been  going  on  for  the  last  three 
hundred  years  about  what  right  government  has  to  for- 
bid any  man  to  spend  Sunday  in  ways  which  seem  per- 
fectly right  to  him,  and  which  are  generally  considered 
so  on  six  days  of  the  week,  but  which  his  neighbors 
think  irreligious  on  the  seventh.  In  other  words,  has 
the  community  any  more  right  to  say  to  the  individual, 
"You  must  abstain  from  amusements  which  we  think 
irreligious,"  than  to  say,  "You  must  observe  all  cere- 
monies  which  seem  religious  to  us?" 

If  the  Puritans,  as  they  were  called  as  early  as  1564 
on  account  of  their  zeal  for  simplicity  in  worship,  could 
have  had  their  own  way  throughout  the  sixteenth  cent- 
ury in  England,  her  people  might  have  become  not  only 
as  thoroughly  Sabbatarian  as  the  Scotch,  but  as  submis- 
sive to  the  clergy,  as  preoccupied  with  theology,  as  slow 
to  produce  any  literature  but  political  pamphlets,  hymns 
and  tracts,  as  intolerant  of  differences  in  religion,  as 
eager  for  burning  witches,  and  as  destitute  of  other 
amusements.  The  magistrates  of  Edinburgh,  accordiag 
to  Eogers'  "Social  Life  in  Scotland,"  actually  con- 
demned a  man  to  be  hanged,  in  July,  1667,  for  playing 
"Robin  Hood,"  but  he  was  rescued  by  the  mechanics. 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  35 

The  best  trait  of  the  Puritans  was  brought  out  by 
their  conviction  that  their  religion  was  too  sacred  to  be 
meddled  with  by  any  sovereign.  The  reputation  of 
Queen  Mary  of  Scotland  was  bad  enough  to  strengthen 
their  belief  that  peasants  who  are  of  God's  elect  have  a 
perfect  right  to  resist  a  monarch  who  is  among  the  rep- 
robate*. Mary  Stuart  was  deposed  and  imprisoned  by 
the  champions  of  the  kirk,  and  her  son  found  much  dif- 
ficulty in  maintaining  his  authority  against  so  demo- 
cratic and  popular  an  organization.  Languet,  a  fugi- 
tive from  French  despotism,  found  a  publisher  in  Edin- 
burgh, as  well  as  in  Basel,  for  his  "Vindication  of  the 
Eights  of  the  People."  That  same  year,  1579,  a  Scotch- 
man named  Buchanan  published  a  book  on  "The  Eight 
to  Eeign."  This  right,  he  says,  belongs  only  to  &uch 
kings  as  have  been  elected  by  the  nation  and  use  their 
power  for  its  good.  The  authority  of  the  legislature  is 
above  that  of  the  crown.  A  beneficent  despot  is  as 
dangerous  an  example  as  an  open-handed  robber.  All 
wicked  kings  are  tyfants,  and  tyrants  may  justly  be 
slain  as  enemies  of  mankind.  The  same  position  is 
maintained  in  the  "History  of  Scotland,"  which  Bu- 
chanan finished  just  before  his  death.  He  was  told 
that  his  books  would  be  prohibited  by  the  king,  but  he 
replied:  "Have  I  told  the  truth?"  "You  have,"  an- 
swered his  friends.  "Then  I  will  abide  his  feud,  and 
all  his  kin's." 

No  such  books  could  then  be  published  in  England, 
where  the  press  was  kept  under  strict  restraint  by  Eliza- 
beth from  the  first.  Her  dauntless  courage,  high  abil- 
ity and  great  popularity,  at  a  time  when  the  nation's 
chief  desire  was  for  a  government  strong  enough  to 
keep  out  the  Spaniards,  enabled  her  to  rule  more 


36  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

despotically  than  any  successor  has  done,  except  Oliver 
Cromwell.  Her  proclamations,  prohibiting  erection  of 
houses  near  London,  forbidding  exportation  of  gram, 
and  commanding  Irishmen  to  return  to  Ireland,  had  the 
force  of  laws.  Judges  and  jurymen  did  whatever  she 
desired.  Parliament  did  not  meet  as  often  as  once  in 
three  years;  members  who  displeased  her  were  sent  to 
the  Tower;  and  ihe  only  instance  in  which  she  changed 
her  course  at  the  request  of  the  House  of  Commons 
was  a  revocation  of  monopolies  in  1601.  No  opposition 
was  excited  by  the  Act  of  1563,  in  consequence  of 
which  wages  were  fixed  by  the  magistrates,  and  kept  so 
low  that  the  laborers  suffered  sadly  from  poverty  during 
two  hundred  and  fifty  years.  Individual  rights  were  so 
far  respected  in  England,  however,  that  the  government 
was  much  less  ready  to  meddle  with  a  man's  property 
than  with  his  religion. 

Elizabeth  knew  that  the  Puritans  were  her  most  trusty 
subjects;  and  she  allowed  their  favorite  bock,  the 
Geneva  Bible,  to  have  free  circulation  from  the  first; 
their  peculiar  dogmas  were  prescribed  in  the  Thirty- 
nine  Articles;  an  admonition  against  stage-plays,  bear- 
baiting,  and  other  amusements  on  Sundays  was  issued 
in  1580;  and  laws  to  the  same  effect  were  passed  soon 
after.  Amusements  on  other  days,  however,  were  pro- 
tected by  the  queen ;  and  so  were  many  of  the  old  holi- 
days and  ceremonies  which  the  people  loved  but  which 
the  Puritans  wished  to  have  suppressed.  !NTo  religious 
services  could  be  held,  except  by  clergymen  approved 
fcy  the  government;  and  even  then  they  were  forbidden 
to  meet  for  public  discussion,  or  to  preach  without 
special  license.  The  Archbishop  of  Canterbury  was 
suspended  for  five  years  because  he  was  slow  to  carry 


PROGRESS   OF  FREEDOM.  37 

out  the  royal  purpose  to  check  the  growth  of  Protest- 
antism. This  purpose  found  a  fit  agent  in  the  next 
archbishop,  who  began  in  1583  a  system  of  repression, 
which  was  so  vigorously  sustained  by  the  court  of  high 
commission,  as  well  as  by  the  censors  of  the  press,  that 
many  of  the  ablest  and  most  zealous  clergymen  in  the 
Church  of  England  were  driven  out  of  the  pulpit. 

The  people  had  already  become  much  dissatisfied 
with  the  immorality  and  inefficiency  of  many  of  the 
pastors  appointed  by  the  nobles  and  bishops;  and 
secret  societies  were  organized  about  1570,  not  only  of 
Gongregationalists  but  also  of  Presbyterians.  The 
latter  followed  Calvin  so  closely  as  to  declare  that  all 
heretics,  however  penitent,  ought  to  be  put  to  death. 
They  were  at  first  openly  in  favor  of  suppressing  every 
form  of  worship  except  their  own,  but  they  found  the 
Church  of  England  BO  mighty  that  they  soon,  concluded 
to  shelter  themselves  under  her  vestments  until  they 
became  strong  enough  to  rule  as  despotically  as  they 
had  done  in  Scotland  since  1560. 

The  right  of  every  congregation  to  choose  not  only 
its  pastor  but  its  creed  and  ritual  was  maintained  all 
the  more  vigorously  against  both  Episcopalians  and 
Presbyterians  because  this  plan  was  actually  followed, 
with  the  approval  of  Elizabeth  and  her  bishops,  by 
refugees  from  Holland  and  Belgium,  who  were  also 
permitted  to  dispense  with  the  Book  of  Common  Prayer. 
Foremost  in  organizing  English  congregations  on  this 
model  was  Eobert  Browne,  who  adopted  the  Dutch  doc- 
trine of  universal  liberty  of  worship.  He  and  his  ad- 
herents were  treated,  despite  Raleigh's  protest  in  Par- 
liament, with  such  severity  that  they  retaliated  by 
circulating  furious  pamphlets  against  the  bishops.  Two 


38  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

clergymen,  a  lawyer,  a  shoemaker  and  a  tailor  were  hung 
for  this  offence.  Browne  and  many  others  took  refuge 
in  Holland,  where  they  could  worship  freely.  Those 
who  remained  behind  had  to  endure  petty  persecutions 
which  finally  drove  some  to  emigration  across  the  At- 
lantic and  others  to  rebellion. 

Elizabeth's  success  in  restraining  Puritanism  from 
becoming  inconveniently  popular  was  largely  due  to  the 
fact  that  she  reigned  in  a  century  when  the  title, 
"Merry  England,"  could  be  used  much  more  justly 
than  ever  before.  Englishmen  were  at  peace  among 
themselves  from  1485  to  1640,  and  were  thus  enabled 
to  make  their  land  twice  as  productive  as  it  had  been 
previously,  to  enlarge  greatly  their  fisheries  and  to  gain 
much  success  as  manufacturers,  especially  of  woolen 
goods.  London  became  the  centre  of  the  world's  com- 
merce about  1580.  English  ships  opened  a  lucrative 
trade  at  this  time  not  only  with  Turkey  and  Egypt  but 
also  with  India,  which  had  been,  since  1556,  under  a 
philanthropic  monarch  who  recognized  the  equal  rights 
of  all  religions.  Russia  had  been  reached  long  before 
by  way  of  the  Arctic  Sea,  and  piracy  in  the  Gulf  of 
Mexico  proved  highly  profitable  to  its  patrons,  among 
whom  was  Elizabeth  herself.  English  sailors  saved 
their  country,  in  1588,  from  a  terrible  invasion  by  de- 
feating the  Armada. 

Scarcity  of  opportunities  for  safe  investment  caused 
much  of  the  wealth  acquired  by  Englishmen  in  the  six- 
teenth century  to  be  spent  on  luxuries  and  amusements. 
Gloomy  caatles  were  transformed  to  stately  palaces  as 
the  Elizabethan  style  took  the  place  of  the  Gothic. 
Houses  of  the  better  class  became  well  supplied  with 
glass  windows,  chimneys,  stoves,  tapestry,  sheets, 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  39 

pillows,  pewter  platters,  and  table-knives  by  the  year 
1580.  Tobacco  was  introduced  soon  after.  Choice 
kinds  of  meat  were  used  freely,  as  may  be  seen  from 
Shakespeare's  account  of  Justice  Shallow's  supper. 
Nearly  a  hundred  kinds  of  wine  were  imported,  and 
the  London  brewers  made  three  or  four  barrels  of  beer 
a  year  for  every  man,  woman  and  child  within  reach. 
Women  followed  eagerly  the  example  of  Queen  Eliza- 
beth, who  left  three  thousand  gowns  behind  her.  Fash- 
ions changed  frequently;  and  costly  silks,  laces  and 
jewels  were  thought  as  necessary  for  gentlemen  as  for 
ladies.  Rich  and  poor  delighted  in  the  Christmas  fes- 
tivities as  well  as  in  the  out-door  sports  of  May  Day, 
and  these  latter  were  then  peculiarly  pleasant  because 
they  were  delayed,  by  an  error  in  the  calendar,  to  what 
was  really  May  ^,1V  The  Puritans  were  unable  to  pre- 
vent the  erection  of  a  theatre  at  London  in  1576;  and 
what  they  called  "the  horrible  vice  of  pestiferous  danc- 
ing" continued  to  be  a  favorite  amusement  of  all 
classes.  Gorgeous  pageants  were  frequent.  Wander- 
ing minstrels  and  strolling  players  were  so  popular 
everywhere  as  to  be  checked  by  special  statute.  The 
national  fondness  for  music  led  to  the  composition  of 
innumerable  songs,  and  Elizabeth  never  represented 
her  people  more  fitly  than  when  she  presided  Joyfully 
at  the  performance  of  one  of  those  gorgeous  masques 
which  were  forerunners  of  the  opera. 

Where  both  queen  and  people  were  so  fond  of 
worldly  pleasure,  there  was  little  hearing  for  the  Puri- 
tans, who  held  that  music  "depraveth  the  mind,"  and 
that  fiddlers,  minstrels  and  musicians,  like  actors  and 
dancers,  were  "a  wicked  brood."  Here,  as  elsewhere, 
the  Episcopal  Church  was  so  non-committal  as  to  be 


40  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

able  to  hold  her  own  during  a  large  part  of  the  next 
century  against  the  exacting  champions  of  a  more  con- 
sistent Protestantism;  and  the  supremacy  of  her  oppo- 
nents was  so  brief  that  England  can  scarcely  be  said  to 
have  ever  become  thoroughly  Protestant  to  the  extent 
in  which  Scotland  became  so  in  1560  and  Geneva  in 
1541. 

If  Puritantism  had  been  supreme  during  the  latter 
part  of  the  sixteenth  century  that  period  would  in  all 
probability  have  been  much  richer  in  theologians  and 
much  poorer  in  poets.  Shakespeare  and  his  contem- 
poraries would  have  had  little  occasion  to  write  plays 
or  even  songs;  Bacon  might  have  confined  his  literary 
labors  to  translating  Psalms,  for  his  brilliant  and  suc- 
cessful works  would  have  been  too  obnoxiously  worldly; 
and  Spencer  might  not  have  dared  to  indulge  his  taste 
for  romantic  imagery  and  Koman  Catholic  ethics  to  the 
extent  needed  for  producing  "The  Faery  Queen." 
England's  literature  might  have  been  almost  as  desti- 
tute of  melody,  beauty,  brilliancy  and  vivacity  as  that 
of  Scotland  at  this  time,  or  of  New  England  before  the 
Eevolutionary  War. 

On  the  other  hand,  if  Elizabeth  had  accepted  the 
hand  of  Philip  II.,  and  succeeded,  with  his  help  and 
that  of  the  Jesuits,  in  making  England  as  narrowly 
Catholic  as  Spain,  or  even  Italy,  the  English  literature 
of  this  period  would  certainly  have  lacked  the  original- 
ity and  daring  which  are  its  peculiar  charms.  Bacon 
with  his  contemporaries,  Gilbert  and  Harvey,  might 
have  been  silenced  like  Galileo.  Spenser,  Shakespeare 
and  other  poets  might  have  been  restricted  too  closely 
to  conventional  and  ecclesiastical  standards  to  do  their 
best  work.  It  is  also  possible  that  a  civil  war  furious 


PROGRESS   OF  FREEDOM.  41 

enough  to  extinguish  literary  life  would  have  been  ex- 
cited by  efforts  of  the  Church  of  Eome  to  recover  the 
lands  which  had  been  confiscated  by  Henry  VIII.  and 
his  adherents.  Nothing  conld  have  been  better  adapted 
than  the  supremacy  of  a  thoroughly  worldly  taste  for 
business  and  amusements,  with  the  approval  of  a  State 
Church,  Protestant  enough  to  exclude  Eomanism  with- 
out encouraging  Puritanism,  for  building  up  that  im- 
mortal literature  which  is  rightly  called  Elizabethan. 
Much  of  its  best  work  was  done  after  the  queen's  death ; 
but  it  was  all  the  legitimate  result  of  principles  which 
she  made  supreme.  Thus  modern  literature  retained 
in  England  that  power  of  depicting  mundane  realities 
and  promoting  mental  vigor  which  it  pesseaeed  origin- 
ally, but  lost  elsewhere. 

That  English  literature  became  remarkably  bold  and 
independent  after  the  defeat  of  the  Armada,  in  1588, 
was  due  partly  to  the  nation's  pride  at  this  vietory  and 
at  others  achieved  by  English  sailors,  partly  to  satisfac- 
tion with  the  general  prosperity  of  the  people,  and 
partly  to  a  growing  admiration  of  the  determination  of 
the  Puritans  to  write  and  worship  as  they  thought. 
This  upward  tendency  of  literature  was  greatly  strength- 
ened by  the  peculiar  requirements  of  its  most  popular 
forms.  A  successful  tragedy  must  give  opportunity  to 
see  pathetic  situations  as  well  as  to  hear  impassioned 
speech;  and  the  spectators  in  England  hare  always  in- 
sisted on  having  battles,  single  conflicts,  murders,  riots 
and  other  impressive  incidents  acted  out  before  their 
eyes,  and  not  merely  recounted  afterwards.  The  need 
of  having  something  done  as  well  as  said  on  the  stage 
is  even  greater  in  comedy,  where  the  exhibition  of 
ridiculous  characters  and  funny  incidents  has  always 


4?  SKETCHES  OF  TIIE 

been  found  as  necessary  as  the  utterance  of  witty  or 
absurd  remarks,  and  where  heroes  and  heroines  must 
not  only  say  but  do  what  is  interesting  and  agreeable. 
It  was  in  conformity  with  artistic  requirements  that 
the  founder  of  English  tragedy,  Marlowe,  "master  of 
the  mighty  line,"  enabled  the  spectators  of  "Tambur- 
laine"  to  see  the  rebel  shepherd,  whose  courage  had 
made  him  a  mighty  monarch,  ride  in  a  chariot  drawn 
by  captive  kings.  Another  early  drama  showed  upon 
the  stage  how  a  legitimate  king  of  England  had  been 
not  only  deposed  for  misrule  by  Parliament  but  mur- 
dered. The  most  impressive  plays  which  Shakespeare 
produced  before  1601  were  the  eight  whose  spectators 
saw  how  their  ancestors  had  risen  in  rebellion  against 
King  John,  Kichard  II.,  Henry  IV.,  Henry  VI.,  Ed- 
ward IV.,  and  Eichard  III.;  how  one  of  these  sover- 
eigns was  deposed  by  the  Lords  and  Commons,  how 
another  was  slain  in  battle  by  his  own  subjects,  and 
how  three  others  were  put  to  death.  Some  of  the 
rebels,  for  instance,  Warwick,  the  king-maker,  and 
Hotspur,  "confident  against  a  world  in  arms,"  are  re- 
markbly  picturesque;  and  among  the  grandest  figures 
which  Shakespeare  drew  are  the  regicides,  Macbeth, 
Brutus  and  Hamlet.  No  spectator  could  doubt  that 
the  king  of  Denmark  was  "justly  served,"  as  is  plainly 
declared  to  be  the  case.  The  same  lesson  was  taught 
by  Beaumont  and  Fletcher  in  "The  Maid's  Tragedy," 
where  Evadne  slays  her  king  on  the  stage  for  treating 
her  according  to  royal  custom,  even  in  England,  and 
where  the  rebels  against  him  are  pardoned  by  his  suc- 
cessor. This  last  play,  like  the  earliest  editions  of 
Hamlet,  were  all  the  more  effective  for  appearing  in 
the  seventeenth  century,  after  the  despotism  of 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  43 

beth  had  been  resisted  successfully  by  Parliament. 
"Kichard  III."  had  already  been  brought  upon  the 
stage  by  Essex,  to  encourage  his  unsuccessful  rebellion. 

Shakespeare  himself,  however,  did  not  care  enough 
for  Magna  Charta  to  refer  to  it  in  "King  John." 
The  noble  champion  of  the  people's  rights,  who  was 
nicknamed  "Jack  Cade,"  is  caricatured  grossly  and 
deliberately  in  "Henry  VI."  Coriolanus  and  Julius 
Cseaar  are  made  to  seem  much  less  guilty  than  they 
really  were,  according  to  authorities  whom  Shakes- 
peare usually  follows  blindly.  He  used  regicide  and 
rebellion  merely  as  stage  properties;  and  thus  he  served 
the  cause  of  freedom  better  than  he  could  have  done 
with  a  patriotic  purpose.  He  called  up  heroes  from 
the  past  in  order  to  attract  spectators,  and  his  voice 
awakened  liberty. 

All  the  patriotism  of  the  Puritans  does  not  win  a 
word  from  him  except  ridicule;  and  his  comedies  are 
excessively  aristocratic  compared  with  others  of  that 
date.  In  Decker's  "Shoemakers'  Holiday,"  for  in- 
stance, a  cobbler  of  low  birth  becomes  Lord  Mayor  of 
London  by  honest  industry,  and  feasts  his  old  friends 
in  company  with  his  king.  The  high-born  heroine  of 
this  play  is  in  love  with  a  young  shoemaker,  but  is 
to  be  inveigled  into  an  aristocratic  marriage.  Before 
the  wedding  procession  enters  the  church  it  is  attacked 
by  a  mob  of  mechanics,  who  expose  the  plot  and  drive 
the  gentleman  off  the  stage.  In  another  comedy,  the 
keeper  of  the  village  pound  wins  the  heart  of  an  heir- 
ess away  from  an  earl,  and  finding  that  his  rival  is 
plotting  against  the  state,  takes  him  and  other  traitors 
prisoner  single-handed,  saying, 

"A  poor  man  that  is  true 
Is  better  than  an  earl,  if  he  be  false." 


44  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

The  view  of  women's  rights  in  "The  Taming  of  the 
Shrew"  does  not  favor  the  supposition  that  when 
Shakespeare  made  seven  of  his  damsels  don  male  attire, 
he  had  any  object  but  variety  in  costume,  humor  in 
situation  as  well  as  in  dialogue,  and  good  acting  of 
parts  which  were  then  taken  by  boys  in  deference  to 
Puritanical  prejudice.  Some  of  the  best  traits  of  Queen 
Elizabeth  may  be  copied  in  Beatrice,  and  some  of  the 
worst  in  Lady  Macbeth.  The  crown  of  England  had 
descended  from  on«  of  the  manliest  of  women  to  one 
of  the  meanest  of  kings  when  Beaumont  and  Fletcher 
filled  their  stage  with  British  soldiers  led  against  inva- 
ders by  a  heroic  queen.  In  Fletcher's  sequel  to  "The 
Taming  of  th«  Shrew,"  Petruchio  takes  a  second  wife 
after  Katherine's  death,  but  is  shut  out  of  the  house 
after  the  wedding  by  a  band  of  women  who  force  him 
to  surrender  at  discretion.  The  heroine  of  "Love's 
Care"  has  been  brought  up  in  camp,  and  can  never  see 
a  fight  without  rushing  into  it.  Twice  she  saves  her 
lovar's  life,  sword  in  hand,  before  affection  softens  her 
into  womanhood.  Her  brother  has  been  brought  up  as 
a  girl,  and  does  not  dare  to  look  at  a  sword  or  go  out 
alone  after  dark.  Even  falling  in  love  is  not  enough 
to  make  him  brave  without  the  additional  stimulus  of 
the  sight  of  his  father  in  deadly  peril.  This  last  drama 
was  founded,  like  one  by  Middleton,  entitled,  "The 
Bearing  Girl,"  on  the  adventures  of  a  lady  of  high 
character  named  Mary  Frith,  who  might  have  done 
much  in  aid  of  a  protest,  published  about  this  time, 
against  the  right  of  husbands  to  beat  their  wives. 

Marlowe's  reputation  for  unbelief  must  have  in- 
creased the  effect  of  Faust's  calling  hell  a  fable,  and  of 
Tamburlaine's  declaring  that  Nature 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  45 

/•      -'Doth  teach  us  all  to  have  aspiring  minds," 

"Still  climbing  after  knowledge  infinite." 

Death  is  called  an  eternal  sleep  by  this  dramatist,  and 
the  same  view  is  expressed  more  than  a  dozen  times 
by  Shakespeare,  who  is  not  following  either  artistic  or 
historical  requirements  in  putting  such  language  into 
the  mouths  of  Brutus,  Hamlet,  Prospero,  Lear,  Borneo, 
Friar  Ludowick,  Eichard  II.,  and  the  widow  of  Ed- 
ward IV.  The  words,  "Miracles  are  ceased,"  are  so 
eut  of  place  in  the  mouth  of  the  mediaeval  archbishop, 
who  is  made  to  speak  them  to  a  bishop,  that  we  must 
suppose  them  to  be  the  author's  own  opinion.  This 
seems  also  to  be  the  case  when  Lucretia  discovers,  as 
she  is  preparing  to  kill  herself,  that  the  legitimate  work 
of  time  is 

"To  eat  up  errors  by  opinion  bred ;" 

>•••••• 

"To  unmask  falsehood,  and  bring  truth  to  light," 

"To  wake  the  morn  and  sentinel  the  night, 
To  wrong  the  wronger,  till  he  render  right;" 

"To  spoil  antiquities  of  hammered  steel, 
And  turn  the  giddy  round  of  Fortune's  wheel." 

The  same  sympathy  with  revolt  against  the  past  is 
prominent  in  a  tragedy  which  was  an  especial  favorite 
with  Emerson,  "Coriolanus."  The  hero  says: 

"What  custom  wills,  in  all  things  should  we  do  't, 
The  dust  on  ancique  time  would  lie  unswept, 
And  mountainous  error  be  too  highly  heaped 
For  truth  to  o'erpeer.    Rather  than  fool  it  so 
Let  the  high  office  and  the  honor  go !" 

These  lines  seem  all  the  more  Shakespearean  because 
they  are  spoken  by  an  aspirant  for  the  consulship  who 
is  finding  fault  with  the  law  requiring  him  to  gain  the 


46  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

consent  of  the  plebeians,  and  who  afterwards  demands 
so  violently  their  exclusion  from  power  that  he  is  ban- 
ished as  a  traitor.  There  is  as  little  sympathy  with 
popular  rights  here  as  in  the  caricature  of  Jack  Cade, 
already  referred  to,  or  in  the  passage  of  that  play  where 
the  members  of  Parliament  are  called  "rude,  unpolished 
hinds,"  or  in  the  eulogium  of  absolute  monarchy  and 
hereditary  rank  in  "Troilus  and  Cressida"  (I.  3).  These 
plays  are  more  favorable  to  the  exaltation  of  exception- 
ally endowed  individuals  than  to  any  recognition  of 
universal  rights.  The  independence  demanded  is  no 
broader  than  that  claimed  by  Carlyle;  but  even  that  was 
a  desirable  innovation  three  hundred  years  ago. 

Another  dramatist,  Chapman,  wrote  such  plain  dec- 
larations of  the  supremacy  of  the  higher  law  as  have 
seldom  been  surpassed.  The  third  act  of  "Byron's 
Conspiracy"  ends  thus: 

"Give  me  a  spirit  that  on  life's  rough  sea 
Loves  t'  have  his  sails  filled  with  a  lusty  wind," 

"There  is  no  danger  to  a  man  that  knows 
What  life  and  death  are :  there's  not  any  law 
Exceeds  his  knowledge ;  neither  is  it  lawful 
That  he  should  stoop  to  any  other  law. 
He  goes  before  them  and  commands  them  all, 
That  to  himself  is  a  law  rational." 

Chapman  also  says : 

"The  mind  hath  in  herself  a  deity." 

"Who  to  himself  is  law,  no  law  doth  need, 
Offends  no  law,  and  is  a  king  indeed." 

— ["Bussy  D'Amhois,"  II.  1. 
"Free  minds,  like  dice,  fall  square,  whate'er  the  cast." 

"He's  never  down  whose  mind  fights  still  aloft." 

—["Only  a  Just  Man  is  a  Free  Man,"  III.  1. 


PROGRESS  OF   FREEDOM.  47 

"A  virtuous  man  is  subject  to  no  prince, 
But  to  his  soul  and  honor :  which  are  laws 
That  carry  fire  and  sword  within  themselves, 
Never  corrupted,  never  out  of  rule." 

The  men  who  speak  these  lines  are  not  particularly 
virtuous.  Coriolanus  leads  his  country's  enemies 
against  her  in  battle.  Timon's  hatred  of  mankind 
makes  him  join  with  the  worst  members  of  society  in 
the  hope  of  destroying  the  best.  Most  of  the  other 
people  who  appear  in  Shakespeare  as  completely  eman- 
cipated from  conventional  restraints  are  drunkards, 
swindlers  and  libertines.  History  gave  him  Anthony, 
but  not  Falstaff,  nor  Antolycus,  nor  Stephano,  nor 
Lucio,  who  "had  as  lief  have  the  foppery  of  freedom  as 
the  morality  of  imprisonment,"  nor  Sir  Toby,  who  says 
to  the  administrator  of  a  perfectly  proper  rebuke:  "Dost 
thou  think,  because  thou  art  virtuous,  there  shall  be  no 
more  cakes  and  ale?"  Thus  Shakespeare  and  Chap- 
man proposed  a  problem,  which  is  still  extremely  diffi- 
cult, but  which  must  be  solved  before  mankind  can  de- 
velop the  highest  possible  form  of  social  life,  the  prob- 
lem how  to  combine  restraint  enough  for  safety  with 
freedom  enough  for  progress. 

The  most  famous  of  lawless  revellers,  the  inimitable 
Falstaff ,  is  plainly  drawn  from  the  life,  and  is  described 
as  delighting  in  precisely  such  adventures  and  habits 
as  are  recorded  of  Shakespeare  himself.  The  opinion, 
universal  until  recently  and  still  predominant,  that  the 
plays  were  really  written  by  the  man  whose  name  they 
have  always  borne,  is  favored  by  many  other  circum- 
stances. The  knowledge  displayed  therein,  consider- 
ing not  only  its  excesses  but  its  defects,  is  just  what 
might  be  expected  of  a  man  who  learned  rapidly  from 
conversation  and  desultory  reading  in  several  of  the 


48  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

modern  languages,  but  had  not  much  regular  education. 
No  one  not  familiar  professionally  with  the  theatre 
could  then  have  met  its  requirements  so  successfully. 
And  no  subject  of  a  queen  so  fond  of  the  drama,  and 
also  of  flattery,  would  have  let  any  other  man  enjoy  the 
credit  of  having  written  the  lines  in  the  "Midsummer 
Night's  Dream"  telling  how  Cupid  failed  in  his  aim 
"At  a  fair  vestal  throned  by  the  west."  It  is  particu- 
larly unlikely  that  so  good  a  chance  of  gaining  the 
queen's  favor  should  have  been  thrown  away  by  a  man 
who  had  been  striving  after  it  vainly  but  eagerly  for 
more  than  a  dozen  years  like  Francis  Bacon,  especially 
when  a  recent  lord-chancellor  was  known  to  have  owed 
his  place  in  great  measure  to  having  pleased  Elizabeth 
by  writing  a  play.  Hatton's  example  was  actually  fol- 
lowed by  Bacon  in  dramatic  performances  of  little  merit 
at  about  the  date  of  the  "Midsummer  Night's  Dream." 
Shakespeare's  genius  is  attested  by  his  intimate  friend, 
Jonson,  and  also  by  the  near  relatives  who  reared  his 
monument.  It  is  altogether  unlikely  that  his  fellow- 
actors  were  mistaken  in  publishing  the  plays  as  his. 

Not  one  of  the  works  attributed  to  Shakespeare  shows 
much  knowledge  of  Bacon's  favorite  truth,  the  suprem- 
acy of  science.  This  has  saved  many  an  Englishman 
from  making  his  intuitions  so  completely  his  law  as  to 
disregard  his  neighbors'  rights.  Metaphysicians  and 
theologians  who  took  abstractions  for  realities  found  the 
authority  of  the  Novum  Organum  to  stand  firm  against 
them.  The  most  famous  passage  of  this  mighty  book 
shows  what  dangerous  tendencies  to  dogmatism  are 
produced  by  the  habit  of  looking  within  for  truth. 
Among  these  "Phantasms  of  the  Tribe"  and  "Phan- 
tasms of  the  Den,"  as  Bacon  quaintly  calls  them,  he 


PROGRESS   OF  FREEDOM.  49 

mentions  preference  for  affirmations  rather  than  nega- 
tions, disregard  of  facts  not  easily  seen,  and  belief  that 
agreeable  propositions  are  more  likely  to  be  true  than 
disagreeable  ones.  He  also  calls  attention  to  such  indi- 
vidual peculiarities  as  that  one  man  has  a  prejudice  for 
very  old  ideas  and  another  for  very  new  ones.  To 
guard  against  such  errors  Bacon  gives  this  practical  ad- 
vice: "In  general,  let  every  student  of  Kature  take  this 
as  a  rule,  that  whatever  his  mind  seizes  and  dwells 
upon  with  particular  satisfaction,  is  to  be  held  in  sus- 
picion." 

Bacon  admits  that  the  best  service  which  he  did  to 
science  was  in  ringing  the  bell  which  called  other  peo- 
ple together  to  work  for  her,  and  he  made  no  discovery 
to  be.  named  in  comparison  with  that  of  the  earth's 
magnetism,  by  Gilbert,  or  of  the  circulation  of  the 
blood,  by  Harvey.  Both  were  his  contemporaries;  but 
the  time  when  scientific  training  could  be  acquired 
easily  was  still  distant.  Among  other  sayings  by  which 
he  brought  that  time  nearer  was  the  warning  that  at- 
tempts to  keep  philosophy  in  harmony  with  religion 
must  give  undue  authority  to  received  theories  and  hin- 
der progress.  To  insist  on  explaining  everything  as 
part  of  the  divine  plan  seems  to  him  to  be  trying  to 
glorify  God  by  a  lie.  Turning  from  the  "Novum  Or- 
ganum"  to  earlier  works  we  find  a  declaration,  in  his 
"Essays,"  that  superstition  is  more  prejudicial  than 
Atheism  to  the  development  of  morality,  and  also  a 
plain  denial  of  the  right  "to  propagate  religion  by  wars 
or  sanguinary  persecutions."  He  blames  all  attempts 
"to  force  conscience,"  or  to  punish  any  language  not 
blasphemous  or  seditious;  and  he  sees  nothing  worthy 
of  death  in  what  the  Puritans  wrote  against  the  bishops. 


50  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

His  "New  Atlantis"  demands  toleration  for  the  Jews, 
whom  both  Shakespeare  and  Marlowe  had  treated  in 
a  way  too  much  in  conformity  to  popular  prejudice. 
None  of  the  famous  Englishmen  of  this  period  seems  to 
have  realized  that  the  greatest  event  of  the  century, 
except  Lu*her's  protest,  was  the  establishment  by  the 
Dutch  of  political  and  religious  liberty.  The  '-New 
Atlantis"  was  written  to  promote  scientific  study;  and 
it  might  have  done  so  if  Bacon  had  not  shown  himself 
singularly  unable  to  make  imaginary  people  interesting. 
When  we  further  consider  the  badness  of  the  verses 
which  he  acknowledged  as  his  own,  for  instance,  the 
"Translation  of  Certain  Psalms,"  it  is  hard  to  believe 
that  he  wrote  the  most  musical  of  songs  and  the  most 
effective  of  dramas. 

Whether  the  greatest  of  dramatists  was  named  Bacon 
or  Shakespeare  is  of  little  importance,  however,  in  com- 
parison with  the  fact  that  almost  all  the  plays  written 
in  English  have  conformed  so  thoroughly  to  the  na- 
tional taste  as  to  deal  mainly  with  our  outer  life  and 
mundane  aspiration.  Novels,  histories  and  books  of 
travel  have  worked  in  the  same  direction  ever  since  the 
invention  of  printing,  and  nowhere  more  successfully 
than  in  England  where  literature  has  always  been  more 
cheerful,  healthy,  and  practically  useful  than  elsewhere. 
Much  of  the  richness  and  beauty  of  the  Elizabethan 
period  was  soon  lost,  on  account  of  a  temporary  ascend- 
ency of  Puritanism;  but  the  nineteenth  century  has 
shown  even  more  plainly  than  the  sixteenth  how  much 
can  be  done  by  delight  in  this  world  and  by  endeavor 
to  be  happy  here,  to  make  life  and  literature  strong, 
sunny  and  glorious. 


PROGRESS  OF   FREEDOM.  51 

The  foremost  champioMS  of  political  liberty  during 
the  beventeenth  century  were  the  Puritans.  They  op- 
posed the  mighty  Elizabeth  with  success  in  1601,  and 
waged  open  war  against  her  contemptible  successor, 
who  began  his  reign  by  imprisoning  clergymen  for  a 
petition  to  make  the  church  ceremonies  more  purely 
Protestant.  Their  faith,  that  their  religion  was  too  sa- 
cred for  any  king  to  be  allowed  to  check  its  growth, 
soon  developed  into  conviction  that  there  was  a  divine 
sanction  for  their  political  rights  also.  They  did  not 
object  to  his  sending  a  Unitarian  and  a  Baptist  to  the 
stake,  with  a  declaration  that  heretics  "ought  to  be 
burned  with  fire,"  nor  to  his  silencing  Selden,  a  histo- 
rian who  had  ventured  to  assert  that  "Liberty  of  in- 
quiry is  the  only  way  which,  in  all  kinds  of  studies, 
leads  to  the  sanctuary  of  truth." 

James  I.  was  not,  however,  permitted  to  enforce  the 
claim  which  he  had  made  in  one  of  his  books  while 
only  king  of  Scotland,  that  he  was  above  the  law.  His 
first  Parliament  in  England  promptly  denied  his  asser- 
tion that  it  sat  merely  by  his  permission.  His  wish  to 
tolerate  the  Catholics  was  checked,  partly  by  the  attempt 
of  some  of  the  most  fanatical  to  assassinate  both  him 
and  bis  Parliament,  and  partly  by  the  protest  of  the 
Commons  against  his  making  laws  without  their  con- 
sent. There  was  a  fierce  contest  about  the  constitu- 
tionality of  his  collecting  revenue  by  his  own  authority 
alone.  The  Londoners  opposed  him,  and  he  threatened 
to  depart  from  their  city  and  take  his  judges  away  with 
him;  but  the  lord  mayor  replied  that  the  citizens  hum- 
bly desired  his  majesty  to  leave  them  the  Thames. 

His  refusal  to  take  part  in  the  long  war  against  Ca- 
thahcism  in  Germany  made  his  unpopularity  greater 


52  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

than  ever;  and  Parliament  seized  upon  an  opportunity 
to  intimidate  those  foes  of  freedom  who  were  assisting 
him  to  violate  the  constitution.  Bacon  was  impeached 
for  taking  bribes  while  sitting  as  judge,  and  confessed 
his  guilt.  He  was  expelled  from  his  post  of  lord-chan- 
cellor and  sentenced  to  an  enormous  fine,  as  well  as  to 
imprisonment;  but  these  penalties  were  remitted  by  the 
king  whom  he  had  served  too  loyally.  A  vigorous  pro- 
test in  favor  of  the  right  of  members  of  Parliament  to 
free  speech  was  adopted  that  same  year,  1621.  The 
king  erased  the  record  with  his  own  hand  and  impris- 
oned the  leading  supporters  of  the  measure,  among 
whom  were  Pym  and  Coke.  Public  opinion  was  so 
much  against  him,  however,  that  he  was  obliged,  before 
the  close  of  his  reign,  not  only  to  promise  to  have  more 
respect  for  the  wish  of  Parliament,  especially  as  re- 
garded foreign  affairs,  but  to  suffer  one  of  his  ministers, 
the  Earl  of  Middlesex,  to  be  convicted  of  bribery  and 
other  misdemeanors  by  the  House  of  Lords.  The  con- 
demnation of  Bacon  and  Middlesex  involved  that  of 
their  master. 

The  next  king,  Charles  I.,  tried  to  levy  contributions 
in  the  form  of  loans,  and  imprisoned  Hampden  and 
other  patriots  who  refused  to  lend;  but  he  was  forced 
to  grant  the  Petition  of  Bights,  and  his  powers  of  ex- 
tortion were  thus  much  diminished.  He  still  insisted 
on  collecting  tariff  duties  without  parliamentary  sanc- 
tion, but  the  House  of  Commons  voted  that  whoever 
should  advise  this,  or  even  pay  the  money  voluntarily, 
would  be  a  public  enemy.  The  same  condemnation 
was  pronounced  upon  all  who  should  favor  disbelief  in 
election  and  reprobation,  or  permit  other  innovations  in 
religion.  Dissenters  from  Calvinism  had  been  obliged, 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  63 

like  Roman  Catholics  and  supporters  of  Episcopal  gov- 
ernment, to  advocate  absolute  monarchy  in  order  to 
have  the  help  of  the  king  and  courtiers  against  the  Pu- 
ritans; and  these  last  continued  so  intolerant  that  many 
friends  of  religious  liberty  were  short-sighted  enough  to 
take  sides  against  the  champions  of  political  freedom. 

The  foremost  advocate  of  the  vote  just  mentioned, 
Eliot,  was  imprisoned  in  the  Tower  for  the  rest  of  his 
life  by  Charles,  who  publicly  declared  his  intention  to 
rule  without  a  Parliament.  This  he  managed  to  do 
for  eleven  years,  by  refusing  to  aid  the  French  or  Ger- 
man Protestants  against  the  Catholics,  levying  tariff 
duties  and  selling  monopolies.  Heavy  fines  were  levied 
on  men  who  refused  to  be  knighted,  or  built  houses  in 
London,  or  violated  forest  laws  which  had  become  ob- 
solete. A  penalty  of  70,000  pounds  was  extorted  from 
the  city  of  London  by  the  Star  chamber,  which  inflicted 
many  atrociously  cruel  punishments  on  Puritan  authors. 
The  High  Commission,  too,  was  on  the  watch  for  of- 
fenders against  the  Church;  and  the  northern  counties 
of  England  were  stripped  of  political  rights  by  the  Roy- 
alist who  afterwards  became  Earl  of  Strafford. 

These  outrages  were  at  first  endured  with  little  com- 
plaint; for  even  so  bad  a  king  was  supposed  to  be  a 
necessary  evil,  and  dread  of  Puritan  austerity  was  in- 
creased by  sight  of  the  indignation  among  the  zealots, 
when  attempts  of  local  magistrates  to  suppress  Sunday 
amusements  called  out  the  royal  proclamation  known 
as  "The  Book  of  Sports."  The  clergymen,  however, 
whom  Archbishop  Laud  removed  by  the  hundred, 
either  for  refusing  to  read  this  proclamation  in  church 
or  for  not  conforming  to  the  pvMafcittf*t  ritual,  had 
many  warm  friends.  There  had  been  little  sympathy 


54  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

with  Prynne  when  this  author  was  punished,  in  1634, 
for  writing  against  the  theatre,  but  there  was  a  great 
deal  three  years  later,  when  he  and  other  Puritans 
were  fined,  mutilated,  branded,  pilloried  and  impris- 
oned for  attacking  the  bishops;  and  the  nation  was 
with  Hampden  when  he  pleaded  in  court  that  same 
year,  1637,  against  the  legality  of  collecting  ship  money. 
This  tax  for  the  navy  had  become  obsolete,  but  had 
recently  been  revived,  and  it  was  enforced  so  generally 
as  to  bring  in  £200,000  annually,  while  the  coasts 
were  left  without  protection. 

England  was  not  yet  ready  for  rebellion,  when  an 
attempt  to  force  Episcopalianism  upon  Scotland  brought 
on  a  riot  in  Edinburgh  on  Sunday,  Aug.  2, 1637.  A 
Scottish  army  entered  England,  and  won  a  battle  against 
the  king,  who  was  unable  to  resist  without  asking  help 
from  Parliament.  The  first  blows  in  a  great  war  for 
liberty  were  struck  by  bigots,  who  held  that  toleration 
was  blasphemously  wicked,  that  all  who  did  not  belong 
to  the  kirk  were  "beastly  slaves  of  Satan,"  and  that 
"pleasures  are  most  carefully  to  be  avoided."  This 
last  principle  they  carried  so  far  as  to  forbid  children 
eight  years  old  to  play,  and  they  denounced  music, 
writing  poetry,  and  bathing,  especially  on  Sunday. 
They  called  men  to  account  for  rescuing  shipwrecked 
sailors  on  that  day,  and  women  for  watering  vegetables 
likely  to  wither — but  they  saved  England. 

Their  support  made  Parliament  strong  enough  to 
abolish  ship  money,  and  every  other  expedient  by 
which  the  king  had  collected  revenue,  to  suppress  the 
Star  Chamber,  the  High  Commission  and  other  lawless 
tribunals,  to  punish  the  judges  who  had  condemned 
Hampden,  and  to  send  Straff ord  to  the  scaffold  as  a 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  55 

traitor.  Charles  had  to  consent  to  the  execution  of  his 
too  faithful  servant,  and  also  to  promise  that  what  soon 
became  famous  as  the  Long  Parliament  should  not  be 
dissolved  without  its  own  consent.  Thus,  in  May, 
1641,  he  accepted  the  position  of  a  constitutional  mon- 
arch, ruling  according  to  the  laws.  If  he  had  kept 
faith  with  the  nation  he  might  have  reigned  safely ;  and 
this  would  have  prevented  the  Presbyterians  from  put- 
ting England  under  a  more  intolerant  rule  than  that  of 
the  bishops.  Pyrn,  Vane,  Cromwell,  and  other  oppo- 
nents of  absolute  monarchy  were  ready  to  ce-operate 
with  Chillingworth,  who  hall  said  in  his  book  against 
the  exaction  of  subscription  to  creeds,  "I  will  love  no 
man  the  less  for  differing  in  opinion  from  me";  and 
the  same  position  had  been  taken  by  many  other  Koyal- 
ists  like  Falkland  and  Herbert  of  Cherbury.  The  lat- 
ter had  published  a  system  of  religion  free  from  intol- 
erance or  superstition,  but  had  unfortunately  written 
in  Latin,  and  overloaded  his  book  with  metaphysics. 
Union  with  such  men  would  have  made  it  possible  for 
Charles  to  establish  a  toleration  of  all  Protestants  with 
little  molestation  of  loyal  Catholics. 

The  golden  opportunity  was  lost  early  in  1642,  when 
Charles  broke  his  word  of  honor  to  the  members  of 
Parliament,  and  came  with  armed  men  to  take  Pym, 
Hampden,  and  three  other  patriots  from  their  seats. 
This  justified  the  suspicions,  excited  by  his  intrigues 
in  Scotland  and  his  sending  the  queen  with  the  crown 
jewels  to  the  continent,  that  he  was  plotting  to  destroy 
English  liberty  by  force.  Vigorous  measures  were 
taken  against  him  and  his  devoted  partisans,  the  bish- 
ops, while  the  need  of  more  help  from  Scotland  in- 
creased the  influence  of  the  Presbyterians  in  Parlia- 


56  SKETCHES  OF   THE 

raent.  Falkland,  Ghillingworth,  and  other  men  who 
hated  all  tyranny  in  Church  or  State,  took  sides  re- 
luctantly with  the  champions  of  absolute  monarchy 
rather  than  suffer  all  literary,  social  and  religious  life 
to  pass  under  the  crushing  yoke  of  Presbyterianism. 
The  nobles  took  the  same  side  so  generally  that  the 
contest  was  largely  one  of  them  and  their  dependents 
against  shop-keepers  and  mechanics.  The  king's  troops 
had  the  advantage  at  first,  but  lost  a  decisive  battle  at 
Naseby,  in  1645, against  Oliver  Cromwell  and  his  army 
of  mighty  men,  bound  together  by  the  fiercest  zeal  and 
the  strictest  discipline. 

The  victorious  soldiers  held  that  advanced  form  of 
Puritanism  which  had  just  inspired  Koger  Williams  to 
denounce  "The  Bloody  Tenet  of  Persecution,"  and 
John  Milton  to  demand  liberty  of  the  press,  on  the 
ground  that  diversity  of  opinion  is  "knowledge  in  the 
making,"  and  progress  toward  truth.  Cromwell  was 
already  the  leader  of  these  friends  of  religious  liberty, 
who  were  called  Independents,  because  they  insisted 
on  the  right  of  every  congregation  to  be  free  from  all 
tyranny,  whether  of  pope,  bishop  or  synod.  They  had 
thus  far  been  able,  with  the  help  of  moderate  and 
patriotic  Episcopalians  like  Pym  and  Selden,to  prevent 
Presbyterianism  from  establishing  itself  as  the  only 
legal  form  of  public  worship  in  England.  The  defeated 
monarch  was  assured,  not  only  by  the  Scotch  but  by 
their  friends  who  controlled  Parliament  that,  by  favor- 
ing them,  he  could  purchase  his  restoration  to  the 
throne.  While  he  was  still  negotiating  with  Parlia- 
ment, he  was  taken  from  its  custody  by  a  party  of  sol- 
diers, who  said,  in  answer  to  his  request,  that  he  should 
not  be  required  to  act  against  his  conscience,  "It  is  not 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  57 

our  maxim  to  constrain  the  conscience  of  any  one,  still 
less  that  of  our  king." 

The  army,  loo,  offered  to  make  him  really  king  again 
if  he  would  promise  to  reign  in  harmony  with  a  re- 
formed Parliament,  in  which  the  people  should  be 
fairly  represented,  to  redress  abuses  in  the  courts  and 
to  allow  no  form  of  worship  either  to  be  prohibited  or 
to  be  made  compulsory.  Such  liberality  was  more 
hateful  than  even  Presbyterianism  to  the  bigoted  Epis- 
copalian. He  made  a  secret  league,  called  an  "Engage- 
ment," with  the  Scotch;  their  troops  entered  England; 
many  Royalists  rose  in  arms  again,  and  people  who  had 
opposed  him  fiercely  now  took  his  side  openly,  as  even 
the  Londoners  threatened  to  do.  Cromwell  and  his 
soldier*  soon  defeated  the  Presbyterians  in  battle  and 
then  expelled  them  from  Parliament,  where  they  had 
just  passed  a  law,  providing  that  all  Atheists,  Unitari- 
ans, or  unbelievers  in  the  Bible  should  be  put  to  death. 
Among  the  heresies  to  be  punished  only  by  imprison- 
ment was  a  new  one,  which  held  that  no  one  ought  to 
believe  what  he  cannot  understand. 

Thus  England  came,  at  the  close  of  1648,  under  the 
authority  of  Cromwell,  Vane,  Sidney,  Marten,  Ludlow, 
and  about  a  hundred  other  Independents  who  were 
generals  in  the  army,  or  members  still  sitting  in  Par- 
liament. They  gave  an  impressive  demonstration  of 
the  fact  that  nations  have  rights  which  kings  cannot 
afford  to  violate.  If  the  judges  of  Charles  I.  had 
merely  deposed  him,  however,  they  could  have  made 
his  eldest  son,  or  his  frienldy  nephew,  Charles  Louis, 
king  on  their  own  terms,  the  desire  of  the  people  to 
retain  the  form  of  monarchy  with  the  substance  of  lib- 
erty would  have  been  fully  satisfied;  and  any  future 


58  SKETCHES   OF   THE 

attempts  at  either  persecution  or  despotism  would  at 
once  have  called  out  an  opposition  which  would  have 
keen  irresistible. 

During  four  years  after  the  execution  of  King  Charles, 
in  1649,  the  attempt  to  set  up  a  republic  seemed  a  suc- 
cess. Some  attempts  at  anarchy  were  easily  suppressed. 
The  Royalists  were  so  submissive  that  Charles  II. 
•gained  scarcely  any  recruits  in  his  march  to  the  centre 
of  ^England  with  a  Scotch  army.  This  invasion  was 
quickly  crushed  by  Cromwell;  and  otherwise  the  people 
enjoyed  such  internal  peace  as  allowed  prosperity  to 
revive  rapidly.  Prejudice  against  Catholics  was  still 
strong  enough  to  bring  a  priest  to  the  scaffold;  but 
other  worship  was  not  interfered  with.  Hobbes  proved 
his  assertion  that  anyone  who  obeyed  the  laws  could 
write  what  he  liked  by  publishing,  in  1651,  his  terrible 
"Leviathan."  This  widely  influential  bock  declared 
that  no  government  which  is  not  useful  to  society  has 
any  right  to  exist;  that  all  vindictive  punishments,  es- 
pecially for  heresy,  should  be  abolished ;  that  all  knowl- 
edge comes  through  the  senses,  and  that  it  is  our  duty 
"not  to  take  any  principle  on  trust." 

Early  next  year,  a  committee  to  reform  the  laws  was 
appointed  with  Matthew  Hale  in  the  chair;  and  many 
measures  were  proposed  which  would  have  been  very 
valuable  as  safeguards  of  individual  rights,  and  which 
have  since  been  adopted,  one  by  one  (see  "The  Puri- 
tan in  Holland,  England  and  America,"  by  Bouglas 
Campbell,  vol.  ii.,  pp.  386-391) ,  The  judges  and  other 
officials  w«re  at  once  changed  for  the  better,  proceed- 
ings were  carried  on  in  English  and  juries  were  permit- 
ted to  give  verdicts  against  the  government.  The  treas- 
ury was  kept  full  despite  the  vigorous  policy  pursued 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  59 

in  Scotland  and  Ireland  as  well  as  toward  Holland, 
but  taxation  was  unpopularly  severe.  The  government 
did  not  represent  the  people  fully,  but  it  was  their 
best  representative  then  possible;  and  its  continuance 
was  the  only  way  either  to  establish  a  real  republic,  or 
to  restore  limited  monarchy.  The  first  duty  of  this 
Parliament  was  acknowledged  to  be  the  convocation  of 
a  new  one  which  should  contain  more  delegates  of  the 
people  but  not  too  many  enemies  of  liberty;  and  Vane 
was  carrying  through  a  reform  bill,  by  which  rotten 
boroughs  were  to  be  disfranchised,  representatives 
were  to  be  given  to  Scotland  and  Ireland  as  well  as  to 
great  towns  in  England,  which  had  hitherto  been  shut 
out,  and  the  suffrage  was  to  be  extended  greatly. 

This  was  the  condition  of  things  on  April  80, 1653, 
when  Cromwell  destroyed  all  that  remained  of  national 
government  by  the  people  and  set  up  his  own  authority 
instead  on  the  basis  merely  of  military  force.  His 
own  soldiers  murmured.  Vane,  Sidney,  and  most  of 
the  other  leading  patriots  openly  refused  support.  His 
violation  of  the  right  of  the  nation  to  a  voice  in  the 
government  was  so  plain  that  he  had  to  wait  for  eigh- 
teen months  before  suffering  any  election  to  be  held 
for  Parliament.  No  one  who  had  fought  againstjiim 
could  be  either  voter  or  candidate;  and  it  was  expressly 
stipulated  that  the  new  members  must  sustain  his 
authority.  They  proved  to  be  so  strongly  against  it 
that  he  promptly  excluded  one-third  of  them  from  their 
seats.  Even  those  he  retained  refused  to  permit  him 
to  collect  revenue,  and  they  would  have  forbidden  him 
to  do  so  without  their  consent  if  he  had  not  sent  them 
away. 


60  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

Then  came  nineteen  months  of  open  and  lawless 
despotism.  He  had  levied  taxes  from  the  beginning 
on  his  own  responsibility,  like  the  Stuarts;  and  he  now 
imprisoned  a  merchant  who  refused  tribute  as  well  as 
the  lawyers  who  showed  the  tax  to  be  illegal.  The 
judges  who  questioned  his  title  lost  their  places.  Lib- 
erty of  preaching  without  a  license  ceased  when  the 
Long  Parliament  was  dissolved;  and  Cromwell  now 
forbade  Episcopalians  to  worship  even  in  private. 
About  two  thousand  Quakers  were  imprisoned  at  vari- 
ous times  during  his  reign,  and  twenty-one  died  under 
the  hardships  of  a  confinement  which  was,  in  some 
cases,  punishment  for  disturbing  public  worship,  but 
was  often  merely  persecution.  Catholics  were  treated 
from  first  to  last  with  great  severity,  especially  in  Ire- 
land; and  an  inoffensive  old  man  who  had  committed 
no  crime  but  that  of  officiating  as  a  priest  was  beheaded 
in  London,  by  Cromwell's  order,  in  1654.  The  victim 
protested  on  the  scaffold,  in  the  name  of  liberty  of 
eonscience,  and  no  more  blood  was  shed  thus  in  Lon- 
don on  account  of  differences  in  religion. 

During  the  last  months  of  1656  the  press  was  fettered 
so  rigidly  that  but  two  journals  survived  out  of  a  dozen, 
and  all  England  was  put  under  the  rule  of  major  gen- 
erals, who  fined,  disarmed  and  imprisoned  people  with- 
out permission  or  interference  from  the  courts.  Vane, 
Marten,  and  other  patriots,  were  imprisoned  for  writ- 
ing against  Cromwell;  a  noted  agitator,  named  Lilburne, 
who  called  himself  "Freeborn  John,"  was  kept  in  jail, 
despite  acquittal  by  a  jury;  and  among  other  authors 
incarcerated  at  this  time  was  Jeremy  Taylor,  who  had 
already  published  a  theory  of  toleration,  which  he  did 
not  practice  or  defend  when  he  became  bishop.  The 


PROGRESS   OF  FREEDOM.  61 

most  advanced  view  of  this  subject,  yet  presented,  was 
that  of  Harrington,  who  said:  "Where  civil  liberty  is 
entire,  it  includes  liberty  of  conscience."  "Liberty  of 
conscience  is  entire,  when  a  man  may  have  the  free 
exercise  of  his  religion,  without  impediment  to  his  pre- 
ferment or  employment  in  the  State."  He  also  held 
that  the  best  government  is  a  republic  based  on  popu- 
lar education  and  universal  suffrage  by  secret  ballot, 
with  rotation  of  chief  magistrates.  His  "Oceara"  was 
for  scholars  only;  but  Cromwell  suppressed  it,  probably 
because  it  insisted  that  rulers  ought  to  conform  to  the 
laws.  His  daughter,  however,  persuaded  him  to  per- 
mit it  to  appear.  At  this  time,  1656,  he  a&ked  one  of 
his  open  opponents,  Ludlow,  what  they  wanted.  Lud- 
low  told  him,  before  his  council,  "That  for  which  we 
fought — that  the  nation  might  be  governed  by  its  own 
consent." 

Another  Parliament  was  intimidated,  next  year,  into 
offering  Cromwell  the  crown.  He  would  have  ruled 
less  arbitrarily  as  king  than  as  dictator;  but  the  array 
preferred  the  dictatorship.  The  controversy  soon  took 
a  turn  &o  hostile  to  Cromwell's  authority  that  he  dis- 
solved this  Parliament  also;  and  his  reign  ended  as  it 
began,  merely  a  display  of  military  force  without  sanc- 
tion from  the  voluntary  consent  of  the  goversed.  It  is 
true  that  he  promoted  reform  in  the  Court  of  Chancery, 
that  he  enabled  the  Jews  to  return  to  England  after 
centuries  of  exile,  that  he  protected  English  sailors  and 
merchants  against  the  Inquisition,  and  that  he  checked 
the  persecution  of  the  Waldenses.  His  greatness,  both 
as  statesman  and  general,  is  manifest.  The  fact  re- 
mains, that  he  overthrew  a  government  which  was 
striving  to  make  England  free,  and  reduced  her  to  the 


C2  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

degrading  necessity  of  choosing  between  despotism  and 
anarchy.  His  rule  had  no  foundation  but  his  own  will, 
and  therefore  it  perished  with  him.  His  death  left  the 
friends  of  liberty  hopelessly  at  variance,  and  brought 
on  anarchy,  from  which  there  was  no  escape  except  by 
restoring  the  Stuarts  on  their  own  terms. 

The  fall  of  the  Puritans  from  power,  in  1660,  was  all 
the  more  complete  on  account  of  the  rigidity  with  which 
they  had  put  down  innocent  amusements,  especially  on 
Sunday.  This,  and  other  forms  of  intolerance,  were 
still  kept  up  by  them  in  New  England.  The  Plymouth 
Pilgrims  and  many  of  the  leading  settlers  at  Salem  and 
Boston  had  been  hospitably  sheltered  in  Holland,  but 
had  not  outgrown  either  their  Sabbatarianism  or  their 
belief  that  only  their  own  form  of  worship  wag  accept- 
able to  God.  They  deliberately  discarded  the  Dutch 
plan  of  making  character,  not  creed,  the  test  of  citizen- 
ship, and  went  back,  like  the  Spaniards,  toward  the  Old 
Testament  ideal  of  a  peculiar  people  among  whom 
there  should  be  no  differences  about  customs,  ceremo- 
nies, or  dogmas.  People  were  whipped  and  set  in  the 
stocks  for  what  was  called  breaking  the  Sabbath;  and 
one  of  the  first  acts  of  the  founders  of  the  colony  of 
Massachusetts  Bay  was  to  send  back  two  of  their  num- 
ber for  using  the  Book  of  Prayer  authorized  by  the  laws 
of  England.  Only  those  men  who  were  members  of 
the  Puritan  churches  were  allowed  to  vote;  laws  were 
passed  to  punish  absence  from  worship,  wearing  of  gay 
attire,  or  purchase  of  dainty  viands;  and  an  oath  of  al- 
legiance to  the  local  authorities  was  imposed  upon  res- 
idents. 

These  proceedings  were  censured  by  a  clergyman 
who,  like  Sidney  and  Harrington,  had  studied  with 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  68 

much  advantage  in  Holland.  Eoger  Williams  had  been 
driven  from  Salem  for  holding  that  neither  heresy, 
blasphemy,  nor  Sabbath-breaking  ought  to  be  punished 
as  crime.  He  found  shelter  at  Plymouth,  but  returned 
to  Salem  in  time  to  protest  against  the  oath  of  alle- 
giance. An  oath,  he  said,  was  an  act  of  worship,  and 
"Forced  worship  stinks  in  God's  nostrils."  He  also 
objected  to  restriction  of  the  franchise  to  church-mem- 
bers. It  was  merely  for  his  opinions  that  he  was  ban- 
ished in  1635,  and  he  had  to  flee  to  the  Indians  to  es- 
cape from  being  sent  back  to  England,  where  he  might 
have  been  worse  treated  by  Laud  and  Straff ord.  He 
was  soon  able  to  found  at  Providence  what  is  now  the 
State  of  Rhode  Island.  He  and  his  associates  were 
bound  by  no  oath,  but  merely  by  a  promise  to  keep 
whatever  laws  might  be  agreed  upon  by  the  majority  of 
house-holders.  Order  was  maintained  without  restrict- 
ing liberty  in  religion,  even  by  exalting  one  sect  above 
another,  or  by  requiring  observance  of  the  Sabbath; 
and  all  peaceably  disposed  strangers,  whether  Jews, 
Catholics,  Quakers,  or  other  heretics,  were  made  wel- 
come. Williams  risked  his  life  to  save  the  colony,  which 
had  banished  him,  from  being  attacked  by  a  formidable 
coalition  of  Indian  tribes,  and  the  sentence  was  then 
repealed.  How  much  his  protest  against  persecution 
had  to  do  with  his  banishment,  may  be  judged  from  the 
fact  that  his  friend  Vane's  advocacy  of  similar  views 
cost  him  his  place  as  governor  of  the  Bay  Colony  in 
1637.  Prominent  among  the  rulers  then  chosen,  and 
for  many  years  kept  in  power,  was  Dudley,  who  had 
seen  toleration  in  force  in  Holland,  and  wrote  his  opin- 
ion of  it  in  these  lines,  found  in  his  pocket  after  hia 
death: 


64  SKETCHES   OF  THE 

"Let  men  of  God  in  courts  and  churchea  watch 
O'er  such  as  do  a  toleration  hatch, 
Lest  that  ill  egg  bring  forth  a  cockatrice 
To  poison  all  with  heresy  and  vice." 

Another  result  of  Vane's  defeat  was  that  Anne 
Hutchinson,  whose  faith  in  the  Inner  Light  had  made 
her  talk  too  boldly  about  the  ministers,  was  driven  out 
into  the  wilderness.  Other  women  who  denied  the  in- 
fallibility of  the  clergy  were  flogged  in  public  at  Bos- 
ton. A  mystic  named  Gorton,  who  believed  in  the 
salvation  of  all  souls,  was  banished  by  Plymouth,  but 
he  tried  to  found  a  new  settlement  outside  of  her  juris- 
diction and  that  of  the  Bay  Colony.  A  band  of  soldiers 
from  Boston  set  fire  to  his  blockhouse  one  Sunday,  and 
led  him  away  to  be  tried  for  his  life.  The  ministers 
and  magistrates  wished  to  put  him  to  death  for  his 
opinions,  but  the  delegates  from  the  towns  saved  him 
and  his  eight  companions  from  anything  worse  than 
hard  labor  in  irons;  and  they  soon  won  so  much  sym- 
pathy that  they  had  to  be  released  and  banished,  after 
being  robbed  of  their  weapons  and  their  cattle.  That 
same  year,  1644,  Williams  published  his  demonstration 
that  there  ought  to  be  no  punishment  except  for  crimes 
against  human  beings,  and  that  error  should  be  met 
by  no  weapon  but  argument.  Citizens  who  petitioned 
against  persecution  were  rebuked  by  Governor  Brad- 
ford at  Plymouth,  and  punished  with  fine  and  impris- 
onment at  Boston.  The  Bay  legislation  made  blas- 
phemy and  Atheism  capital  crimes;  and  it  was  also 
enacted  that  Catholic  priests  should  be  banished  and 
put  to  death  if  they  returned.  There  was  general  ap- 
proval in  Massachusetts  and  Connecticut  of  the  books 
in  which  Cotton  urged  that  Jesus  delights  in  the  blood 
of  men  who  reject  him  knowingly  (see  Luke  xix,,  t7, 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  65 

and  Eev.  xix.,  11-21).  Another  popular  preacher, 
named  Ward,  who  called  himself  "The  Simple  Cobbler 
of  Agawam,"  denounced  toleration,  in  spite  of  kaviog 
had  the  benefit  of  it  in  Holland  himself,  and  asserted 
that  such  "polypiety  is  the  greatest  impiety." 

The  habit  of  excluding  people,  on  account  of  differ- 
ences about  religion,  from  residing  in  Massachusetts, 
soon  led  to  whipping  and  hanging  also.  A  Baptist  was 
severely  flogged,  in  1651,  for  uniting  with  a  few  breth- 
ren in  worship.  The  same  punishment  was  established 
for  every  Quaker  who  should  enter  the  Bay  Colony; 
and  this  law  was  passed  before  the  slightest  disturbance 
was  made  there  by  any  member  of  the  sect.  It  was 
soon  enacted  that  those  who  returned  from  banishment 
should  be  hanged;  but  none  of  the  laws  against  them 
charged  them  with  any  worse  offense  than  holding  pe- 
culiar opinions  and  meeting  by  themselves  for  worship. 
Two  of  their  women  did  expose  themselves  improperly, 
but  it  was  after  a  persecution  in  which  many  of  their 
sisters  had  been  whipped,  naked  to  the  waist,  until 
their  backs  streamed  with  blood,  and  after  four  of  their 
preachers  had  been  hanged  on  Boston  Common. 

One  at  least  of  these  martyrs  never  preached  in 
Massachusetts.  Mary  Dyer  had  left  Boston  after  her 
baby's  grave  was  violated  by  Governor  Winthrop  be- 
cause she  was  in  sympathy  with  Mrs.  Hutchinson. 
Twenty  years  later  she  was  arrested  because  she  came 
back  from  Rhode  Island  to  comfort  two  of  the  impris- 
oned preachers.  All  three  were  banished,  and  warned 
that  the  gallows  was  ready  for  them.  All  three  soon 
reappeared  to  protest  against  the  bloody  laws,  and 
were  promptly  sentenced  to  the  scaffold.  "Yea,  and 
joyfully  I  go,"  said  Mary  Dyer.  She  had  seen  hw 


66  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

companions  hanged,  after  the  Thursday  lecture,  and 
had  mounted  up  the  ladder  cheerfully,  when  she  was  told 
that  she  might  come  down  and  depart  in  peace.  "Here 
I  am,"  she  said,  "willing  to  suffer  as  my  brethren  have 
done.  Unless  you  will  'null  your  wicked  law,  I  have 
no  freedom  to  accept  reprieve."  She  was  carried  down 
the  ladder  and  out  of  the  colony;  but  she  soon  came 
back  and  told  Governor  Endicott  and  the  little  Legisla- 
ture, on  May,  30, 1660,  that  the  Lord  had  sent  her  to 
bid  them  repeal  their  cruel  laws.  The  next  morning 
she  was  led  to  the  gallows,  with  drums  beating  so  that 
she  could  not  be  heard.  She  was  told  on  the  scaffold 
that  she  might  eave  he* life  by  leaving  the  colony;  but 
she  replied,  "JJay,  I  cannot;  for  in  obedience  to  the 
Lord  I  came,  and  in  his  will  1  abide,  faithful  to  the 
death."  She  warned  her  persecutors  that  her  blood 
would  be  required  at  their  hands,  and  refused  to  accept 
the  prayers  of  the  ministers  who  stood  by,  or  to  obey 
their  exhortation  to  repent.  Her  last  words  were,  "I 
have  been  in  Paradise  for  several  days." 

Quaker  preachers  had  roamed  far  and  wide  through 
the  settlements  in  North  America,  as  well  as  through 
Central  and  Southern  Europe,  and  had  even  visited 
Asia  and  Africa.  They  were  treated  cruelly  in  Catho- 
lic lands,  as  well  as  in  Great  Britain,  though  not  sen- 
tenced to  death;  they  were  tolerated  by  the  Moslems 
and  most  of  the  American  colonists;  and  only  one  coun- 
try in  the  world  hung  them  merely  for  coming  back 
after  they  had  been  banished.  The  Boston  atrocities 
continued  until  Charles  II.  interfered;  and  there  was 
another  persecution  some  years  later,  though  not  unto 
death.  Khode  Island  still  kept  foremost  among  the 
colonies  in  religious  liberty.  Maryland  had  always  ex- 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  67 

eluded  Jews,  and  now  disfranchised  Catholics.  Quakers 
had  always  been  safe  at  Baltimore,  but  they  had  been 
whipped  at  Plymouth  and  New  Haven. 

Sabbath-breakers  were  liable  to  be  flogged  in  both 
these  colonies,  and  also  in  Massachusetts  Bay  where  no 
one  was  allowed  to  keep  cards  or  dice.  A  Plymouth 
woman  was  fined  for  hanging  out  her  washing  on  Sun- 
day, and  a  Bostonian  was  put  in  the  stocks  for  kissing 
his  wife  on  the  doorstep.  Absentees  from  church  were 
fined,  and  wages  were  fixed  by  statute  at  both  Boston 
and  New  Haven.  The  founders  of  the  latter  colony 
began  by  voting  that  "The  Scriptures  do  hold  forth  a 
perfect  rule  for  the  direction  and  government  of  all 
men."  It  was  accordingly  agreed  that  only  church- 
members  should  vote,  and  that  there  should  be  no  trial 
by  jury.  Among  the  capital  offenses  was  profaning 
the  Lord's  day  "proudly,  presumptuously,  and  with  a 
high  hand."  A  man  was  whipped  for  "singing  pro- 
fane songs";  and  no  stranger  could  sojourn  there  for 
more  than  a  month  without  permission  from  the  mag- 
istrates. 

This  last  enactment  did  much  to  keep  the  colony  a 
small  one  until  1662,  when  it  was  merged  in  that  of 
Connecticut,  which  started  at  the  same  time,  but  on  a 
broader  basis.  Its  founders  had  objected  in  vain,  before 
leaving  Massachusetts,  to  the  restriction  of  suffrage  to 
church-members.  Their  pastor,  Hooker,  preached  at 
Hartford  a  sermon  declaring  that  "the  choice  of  public 
magistrates  belongs  unto  the  people,"  and  recommend- 
ing that  the  foundation  of  authority  be  laid  "in  the  free 
consent  of  the  people"  in  order  to  secure  their  obedi- 
ence and  love.  This  public  statement  of  democratic 
principles  was  made  on  June  10, 1638;  and  the  written 


08  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

constitution,  adopted  on  January  24,  1639,  was  the 
earliest  one  by  which  the  suffrage  was  anywhere  guar- 
anteed to  all  men. 

Political  rights  had  already  been  as  fully  established 
in  Rhode  Island;  but  it  was  not  until  eight  years  later 
that  the  form  of  government  was  publicly  declared  to 
be  "Democratical,  that  is  to  say,  a  government  held  by 
the  free  and  voluntary  consent  of  all,  or  the  greater 
part,  of  the  free  inhabitants."  The  provision  adopted 
in  1G58,  that  voters  must  hold  real  estate,  meant  at 
that  time,  and  for  generations  afterwards,  merely  that 
they  must  be  permanent  residenta. 

No  witch  was  put  to  death,  before  1692,  in  any  colo- 
ninal  town,  except  Boston  and  Fairfield,  Connecticut; 
and  nowhere  in  New  England  was  anyone  ever  burned 
alive  for  witchcraft,  heresy,  blasphemy,  or  any  other 
offense  not  now  punished  as  a  dangerous  crime.  Bang- 
ing Quakers  was  so  unpopular  a  measure  in  Boston, 
that  the  scaffold  was  guarded  and  the  streets  patrolled 
by  armed  men.  Toleration  petitions  had  already  been 
presented  there  and  at  Plymouth.  More  settlers  were 
so  much  needed,  that  it  was  foolish  to  try  to  keep 
out  all  but  Puritans;  and  the  attempt  had  to  be 
given  up  after  Episcopalianism  regained  supremacy  in 
England. 

The  collapse  of  Puritan  rule,  in  1660,  was  a  just  pun- 
ishment for  Cromwell's  usurping  and  carrying  on  the 
government  without  consent  of  the  governed.  It  was 
largely  his  fault  that  Vane,  Sidney,  Ludlow,  and  other 
consistent  Independents  were  not  able  to  remove  the 
impression,  already  given  by  the  members  of  their  own 
sect  in  Massachusetts,  and  by  the  Presbyterians  in 
both  England  and  Scotland,  that  the  Puritans  did  not 


PROGRESS   OF  FREEDOM.  89 

consider  any  man  but  themselves  good  enough  to  have 
any  voice  in  government.  Their  open  opposition  to 
all  amusements,  however  innocent,  increased  that 
hatred  among  the  people  which  swept  them  forever 
from  power.  The  Puritans  who  remained  in  England 
were  subjected  to  many  persecutions,  and  were  ex- 
cluded from  the  House  of  Commons,  as  well  as  from 
serving  as  magistrates  or  as  officers  in  the  army  or 
navy.  In  this  and  other  ways  they  were  treated  like 
Catholics,  and  classed  with  them  as  dissenters.  The 
Puritan  name  survived  only  in  history.  Opponents  of 
absolute  monarchy  were  known  as  Whigs,  a  title  bor- 
rowed from  Scotland,  where  enemies  of  kings  and 
bishops  were  tortured  and  murdered  in  great  numbers. 
The  toleration  controversy,  which  the  Puritans  had 
carried  on  among  themselves,  continued  until  it  was 
decided  in  favor  of  a  moderate  amount  of  liberty  by 
comparatively  irreligious  men  acting  under  the  pres- 
sure of  peculiar  circumstances.  The  Eevolution  of 
1688  gave  a  permanent  triumph  to  that  principle  of  re- 
sistance to  tyrants  for  which  the  Puritans  had  fought 
bravely.  Their  neglect  of  other  men's  rights,  as  re- 
gards both  government  and  amusements,  was  punished 
cruelly.  Their  heroic  struggle  to  gain  political  and 
religious  liberty,  if  only  for  themselves,  was  rewarded 
by  the  final  establishment  of  a  broader  freedom  than 
most  of  them  desired. 

I  was  asked  recently  how  it  happened  that  American 
literature  had  been  so  rich  of  late  years  in  writers  like 
Holmes,  Lowell,  Saxe,  Stockton,  Clemens  and  Brete 
Harte  while  scarcely  a  single  book  was  written  in  New 
England  during  two  hundred  years  after  the  lauding 
of  the  Pilgrim  Fathers  which  even  calLed  out  a  smile 


70    SKETCHES  OF  THE  PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM. 

except  in  pity  for  the  unfortunate  readers.  During 
these  two  centuries  there  were  quite  a  number  of  funny 
novelists,  poets  and  dramatists  in  England,  and  the 
comic  element  was  particularly  prominent  in  the  liter- 
ature of  the  last  forty  years  of  the  seventeenth  century. 
Puritanism  collapsed  about  1660  in  England,  and  that 
country  was  thus  enabled  to  produce  a  brilliant  comic 
literature.  Puritanism  remained  supreme  here  until 
about  1830,  and  its  shadow  hung  heavy  over  American 
thought  until  the  rosy  dawn  of  Transcendentalism. 
Emerson  opened  the  way  for  the  new  literature  in 
which  we  all  rejoice;  but  we  must  still  wait  for  the 
full  daylight  of  Science. 


APPENDIX. 

A   CRIME   AGAINST    LIBERTY. 


The  sacred  principle  that  governments  mu&t  derive 
"their  just  powers  from  the  consent  of  the  governed" 
is  now  more  fully  established  in  France  than  ever  be- 
fore. Danton  and  Robespierre,  for  instance,  made  a 
deplorable  mistake  in  appealing  to  bullets  instead  of 
ballots  against  the  Girondists.  Even  the  danger  from 
rebels  and  invaders  did  not  justify  the  long  Reign  of 
Terror;  there  was  very  little  persecution  for  opinions 
about  religion,  but  there  was  intimidation  enough 
to  make  peaceable  citizens  afraid  to  take  part  in 
politics. 

Patriotism  revived,  however,  under  the  mild  rule  of 
the  Directory;  and  open  opposition  was  made,  in  1797, 
to  Bonaparte's  system  of  plundering  and  enslaving 
Italy.  His  own  agents  at  Paris  told  him  that  this  party 
was  composed  almost  entirely  of  Republicans;  and 
this  was  acknowledged  by  the  Directory  afterward. 
The  elections,  for  the  four  years  ending  with  1799, 
show  that  the  majority  of  Frenchmen  wishd  to  preserve 
the  Republic  by  keeping  up  friendly  relations  with 
foreign  countries  and  restoring  harmony  at  home. 
There  was  much  opposition  in  the  Councils,  in  the 
summer  of  1797,  not  only  to  the  refusal  of  the  Directors 
to  accept  the  honorable  peace  then  offered  by  Great 


72  SKETCHES  OF  THE 

Britain  but  to  their  whole  system  of  revolutionizing 
and  plundering  friendly  cities  in  Italy.  The  soldiers 
there,  especially  Bonaparte,  were  so  provoked  at  this 
as  to  threaten  to  march  back  and  attack  Paris. 

The  party  of  peace  also  wished  to  permit  the  labor- 
ers, who  had  fled  from  their  farms  or  looms  across  the 
frontier  during  the  Reign  of  Terror,  to  return  to 
France.  The  warmest  debate  in  the  Councils  was 
called  out  by  the  demand  of  one  of  the  Five  Hundred, 
Camille  Jordan,  that,  as  priests  were  no  longer  paid  by 
the  government,  they  should  not  be  required  to  pledge 
allegiance,  and  also  that  all  citizens  should  be  allowed 
to  erect  symbols  of  their  religion,  keep  their  holy  days 
openly,  and  give  notice  of  their  meetings  by  ringing 
bells.  It  was  also  urged  that  the  banished  priests 
might  be  safely  recalled,  as  the  Pope  had  declared  that 
all  Frenchmen  ought  to  acknowledge  the  authority  of 
the  Republic.  The  Catholics  insisted  that  they  had  a 
right  to  worship  the  GoJ  of  their  fathers  in  the  old 
way;  but  they  were  reminded  of  the  massacre  of  Saint 
Bartholomew  by  men  who  said  frankly,  "We  do  not 
want  the  God  of  your  fathers." 

Among  the  haters  of  priests  was  a  Director  whose 
name  is  printed  in  many  ways,  but  was  signed  thus  by 
himself,  Larevelliere-Ltjpaux.  He  was  at  the  head  of 
a  new  sect,  to  whioh  Paine  belonged,  that  of  the  Theo- 
philauthropists,  lovers  of  G0d  and  man.  They  rejected 
the  Bible,  and  held  festivals  In  honor  of  Socrates, 
Rousseau  and  Washington.  Twenty  churches  in  Paris 
had  been  given  them;  but  the  tendencies  which  were 
breaking  down  the  old  religions  were  not  building  up 
new  ones.  Larevelliere  asked  Talleyrand  how  converts 
could  be  made;  and  the  answer  was,  "All  you  have  tc 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  73 

do  is  this.  Get  crucified,  and  rise  again  the  third 
day." 

Larevelliere's  bigotry  made  him  side  with  his  col- 
leagues, Barras,  who  thought  only  of  keeping  himself  in 
power,  and  Rewbell,  who  knew  of  no  better  way  of 
filling  the  empty  treasury  than  plunder.  All  three 
held  that  the  best  government  is  that  of  the  strongest; 
and  the  army  was  at  their  disposal.  Against  them 
were  the  majority  of  the  deputies  as  well  as  of  the 
citizens,  and  also  of  the  journalists,  who  then  enjoyed 
great  liberty.  Carnot  and  another  Director  favored 
the  moderate  party,  but  were  constantly  outvoted  by 
their  colleagues.  It  was  these  latter  who  were  respon- 
sible for  those  depredations  on  American  commerce, 
and  insults  to  an  American  ambassabor,  which  came 
very  near  bringing  on  war. 

The  party  of  peace  knew  itself  to  be  in  great  danger. 
The  National  Guard  was  practically  disbanded;  Car- 
not's  demand  for  reorganization  was  rejected  by  his 
colleagues.  No  force  which  he  and  his  friends  could 
have  got  together  would  have  fought  long  against  the 
conquerors  of  Italy;  and  the  result  would  have  been 
the  supremacy  of  Bonaparte.  The  patriots  who  had 
said,  "The  French  have  no  masters  but  the  laws," 
refused  to  violate  the  constitution,  even  in  self-de- 
fence. 

At  three  o'clock  on  the  morning  of  Sept.  4, 1797,  a 
cannon  gave  the  signal  for  General  Augereau,  who  had 
been  sent  for  the  purpose  by  Bonaparte,  to  march  with 
ten  thousand  soldiers  to  take  possession  of  the  Tuile- 
ries,  where  the  Councils  had  hitherto  met.  A  smaller 
party  tried  in  vain  to  find  Carnot,  and  arrested  the 
other  Director  on  that  side.  Some  of  the  deputies 


74  SKETCHES   OF   THE 

were  taken  into  custody,  and  others  ordered  to  meet 
in  places  selected  in  violation  of  the  constitution.  De- 
crees were  passed  by  mere  fragments  of  Councils,  and 
under  intimidation,  to  annul  the  election  of  deputies 
and  municipal  magistrates  in  more  than  half  of  France, 
Paris  included,  to  suppress  forty-two  journals  and  put 
the  others  under  censorship,  and  to  banish  Carnot 
with  fifty-three  legislators,  several  other  patriots  in 
high  positions,  four  hundred  writers  for  the  press,  and 
all  the  refractory  priests.  None  of  these  exiles  had  a 
trial,  some  of  them  were  treated  cruelly,  and  many  were 
sent  to  Guiana,  whose  deadly  climate  gave  it  the  name 
of  "the  dry  guillotine."  This  "coup  d'  etat"  took  place 
in  the  month  of  fruit,  Fructidor. 

The  demands  of  the  majority  were  again  denied  after 
the  election  in  1798;  intimidation  continued;  and  a 
conscription  was  established  to  procure  soldiers  for 
needless  wars.  Among  the  petty  tyrannies  was  a  pro- 
hibition to  celebrate  Sunday,  even  by  dancing  and 
going  to  the  theatre.  In  short,  the  rule  of  the  Direc- 
tory became  so  unpopular  that  Bonaparte  found  it  easy 
to  usurp  absolute  power.  The  government  had  already 
become  too  much  centralized  by  war  for  individual 
liberty  to  be  maintained;  and  the  Kepublic  soon  ceased 
to  exist  even  in  name.  This  was  not  because  its  rulers 
had  been  too  democratic,  but  because  they  were  too 
despotic. 

Some  of  the  benefits  of  the  Kevolution  have  never 
been  lost,  even  temporarily.  Jews  and  Protestants 
have  continued  to  enjoy  full  liberty  of  worship.  The 
public  schools  have  been  kept  up,  though  they  were 
too  much  centralized  by  Napoleon,  who,  for  instance, 
thought  lectures  on  history  incendiary.  The  great 


PROGRESS  OF  FREEDOM.  75 

prizes  of  life  have  remained  within  the  reach  of  citi- 
zens of  lowly  birth.  No  Frenchman  has  stood  too  high 
to  be  taxed  or  too  low  to  be  protected  by  the  laws.  It 
has  been  impossible  to  restore  primogeniture;  and  most 
ot  the  land  which  was  taken  from  the  aristocracy  and 
sold  to  the  peasantry  is  still  owned  as  little  farms  which 
make  millions  happy.  These  blessings  are  worth  all 
they  cost. 


A     000  191  055     3 


